Governor Pataki’s public schedule for Sunday included at least two prominent events in Manhattan — his appearance at the Israel Day Parade and his appearance a short time later at the Cuban Parade. What the schedule pointedly failed to mention was the news of the day, that the leader of the Republican administration in the state of New York was going to take time out between the two parades to go to a fundraiser for the Manhattan Independence party and share a dais with Lenora Fulani, a woman who cochaired Patrick Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

Ms. Fulani is also the demagogue who blamed the terrorist attacks of September 11 on “our government’s aggression and arrogance,” and Mr. Pataki isn’t the only prominent politician in town who is romancing her. Ms. Fulani says she met two weeks ago with Mayor Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for policy, Dennis Walcott, to discuss education policy. She says she brought along Fred Newman, who in 1985, according to the Anti-Defamation League, called Jews “storm troopers of decadent capitalism against people of color the world over.”

If what this meeting was really about was education policy, it’s one of the best arguments we’ve heard yet against giving Mr. Bloomberg control of the city’s public schools. Better the schools be run by the current board of education, troubled though it is, than by a mayor who is going to be taking policy advice from the likes of Ms. Fulani and Mr. Newman. But let us give Mr. Bloomberg the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Fulani-Walcott meeting was not about education policy, but about what Mr. Pataki’s appearance with Ms. Fulani was about — politics. And that in particular, it was designed to get Mr. Bloomberg, and his fellow Republican, Governor Pataki, the Independence Party line on the ballot and the votes that come with it.

Well, if political gain was the intention of all this political romancing, it seems likely to backfire. If the next person running against Mr. Bloomberg runs some negative ads featuring the mayor’s education-policy advisers Newman and Fulani, there’s a good chance that the votes lost by Mr. Bloomberg as a result will outweigh any he gains on the Independence line. And likewise with Mr. Pataki, whose appearance at that fundraiser Sunday surely marks one of the low points of his governorship.

Though the Republicans are the ones that seem most vulnerable on this score, the Democrats are not without exposure, either. Also at the Sunday fundraiser for Manhattan Independence Party was New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who is a Democrat and who seems otherwise possessed of the notion that the storm troopers of decadent capitalism are Wall Street investment analysts. It’s enough to make one wonder whether there’s a candidate out there who believes that with a warm-spirited defense of capitalism, and with some moral clarity, he or she might find a ready romance with the electorate.