That’s quite a batch of material Mayor Bloomberg has been mailing out on behalf of his campaign for “Proposal 3,” which might as well be called the “Ban the Party You Can’t Beat” amendment of 2003. The mailings carry expensive, glossy photographs of all kinds of supporters, a community activist, a “small-business owner,” a policeman active in politics, a state senator, along with the mayors of a bunch of cities New York doesn’t want to be like, such as Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Jose, Houston, Seattle, and Denver. Of all the people Mr. Bloomberg could have used to tell the story of what he wants to do, he seems to have excluded only one — Lenora Fulani.

She is the Marxist whose Independence Party endorsed the mayor after he bought into the nonpartisan elections scheme. Her party’s endorsement delivered more votes than the margin by which Mr. Bloomberg won the election. It is Lenora Fulani who stands to gain more than anyone else — if there is anyone else who stands to gain — from the charter revision proposal for which the mayor is plumping. Proposal 3 is the door through which she and her ilk, who have made common cause with everyone from Fidel Castro to Colonel Qadhafi, hope to ride to influence in city politics. And she is neither pictured, nor quoted, in any of the eight election mailings the mayor has done on Proposal 3.

It’s amazing, though only of a piece with the rest of the mayor’s campaign on the issue. This newspaper has no objection to the mayor’s spending his legally gotten billions trying to sideline political parties in the city. Nor do we think there should be a lim it on his spending. Nor do we believe he should be prohibited from using tactics that have been described by the New York Times as “sneaky.” The Times was referring to his failure to attach his own name to the mailings, but instead hiding behind a front group called the Committee to Empower All New Yorkers, which our Dina Temple-Raston outed last week. The mayor’s reputation, like his cash, belongs to him, and so far as we’re concerned, he can do with it what he wants.

But Lenora Fulani — well, we’d have thought he’d have made at least a campaign appearance with her on the issue. He has brought her advisers into City Hall. And this is her pet project. We don’t see eye to eye with Congressman Rangel on much. Nor do we find ourselves often in harness with the Democratic Party. The Amsterdam News we don’t agree with either, though we wouldn’t miss an issue. But they know this proposal is a threat to the legitimate institutions they’ve worked through all these years. “Why can’t he just be honest about what he did?” the teachers union boss, Randi Weingarten, asked about the mayor when she met with reporters yesterday at City Hall. “If he made a deal with Lenora Fulani, he should just say so.”

The mayor’s spending on Proposal 3 may well advance Ms. Fulani’s long quest for a position of influence in the city. But eventually the people are going to call a stop to it. This is what happened with Proportional Representation, which was brought in during the 1930s and eventually landed a couple of communists in the municipal legislature. But it never accomplished much more than that, and the people finally did away with the idea. If the mayor gets his way, Ms. Fulani may have her moment of glory. But eventually voters are going to figure out a way to aggregate their money and bring back the political parties through which they’ve traditionally worked. Perhaps by focusing on the real problems of this city: a bloated government, confiscatory taxes, and overly harsh regulation of people trying to make a living.