Why the Mayor Lost

The defeat of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to block political parties from being able to use primary elections to choose their nominees is an encouraging sign for the city — and may yet prove to be a help to the mayor as he prepares for his bid for a second term. The reason the mayor lost, by our lights, is that what he wanted to do with this proposal was eviscerate the Democratic Party in the City. But it was hard for him to go into that fight with much sympathy, let alone credibility. For he ran for office on a platform opposed to tax increases, yet turned around and adopted as his administration’s policies the main line of the Democratic Party ideology, which is to meet every crisis by boosting spending and raising taxes. If the mayor was going to make raising taxes, imposing more regulations on restaurants and other businesses, and boosting spending the thrust of his administration, what was the point of charter reform? In the end, he so alienated the conservative wing of the reform movement that, though he went into the fight with a lot of money, he had few allies.