Last week brought both good news and bad news for Fernando Ferrer. The good news: For the first time since mid-March, another candidate for mayor had a worse week than he did. The bad news: The unlucky candidate is Mayor Bloomberg, and not one of Mr. Ferrer’s Democratic rivals.

The mayor’s problem is the inertia surrounding the renewal of ground zero, the still-empty pit in which Governor Pataki’s political career may already have been buried. Mr. Bloomberg seeks to avoid the same fate. It is certainly lucky for him that the governor selfishly seized so much of the power to redevelop the World Trade Center site for himself during a time when the city administration was changing hands.

The election season will come to its intermediate climax – the primary – just as we mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11. The heroic, inspiring cleanup effort demonstrated a can-do mentality. But that was then, and this is now, and the city seems to be paralyzed by bad plans and bureaucratic wrangling.

Mr. Bloomberg is responsible for few of the problems, but he does need to accept responsibility for his relative silence and lack of leadership in overcoming the inertia that seemingly has paralyzed the project since the conclusion of the cleanup.

The question is, who can exploit Mr. Bloomberg’s weakness on this issue? Mr. Ferrer and C. Virginia Fields have both been largely silent. Council Speaker Gifford Miller seems to have discovered ground zero just last week. It could be argued that other than the mayor, Mr. Miller in his role as speaker was perfectly positioned to criticize this unfolding embarrassment. Certainly, the potential for a string of highly visible public hearings might have put the City Council in play as a factor in the discussion.

Once again, it fell to Rep. Anthony Weiner to seize the day. Mr. Weiner seems to be up front on every issue and has been winning favorable notice in newspapers from the Village Voice to the New York Post. At mayoral forums, he seems to connect with more of the audiences than do his opponents. Yet he continues to languish with Mr. Miller at the bottom of the polls. Of course, even Mr. Weiner’s aggressive posture paled once Donald Trump weighed in.

Last week should have been Mr. Miller’s week. The city budget process is usually the opportunity for the speaker to get down and dirty. But when Mr. Bloomberg released his executive budget, you could almost hear the air escape from the speaker’s balloon. Mr. Bloomberg issued a budget document with a little something for everyone and left Mr. Miller and the Democrats on the Council with few cuts to restore and little to complain about.

This was the high point of Mr. Bloomberg’s week – but only as it relates to the election in November. The budget document is one designed to appeal to Democrats (who, after all, make up the vast majority of voters). It is the mayor’s good luck that his Republican opponents in the September GOP primary seem to be unable to raise the question about how we keep spending with “out-year” deficits looming. If no one holds the mayor’s feet to the Republican fire, his deft dance between party affiliation and ideology will continue unimpeded.

The Republican Party line in November is more critical than ever. The value of the Independence Party line will almost assuredly continue to decline as Mr. Bloomberg’s opponents attempt to hang Independence Party boss Lenora Fulani around his neck at every turn.

Meanwhile, the Bloomberg financial juggernaut rolls on: the announcement that the mayor will spend $100,000 on a five-week Internet advertising blitz is the kind of outrageous discretionary expenditure that none of his opponents can even dream of.

Mr. Ferrer might not have endured the worst week of all candidates, but it was a lousy week nonetheless. A routine announcement of endorsements from a half-dozen Brooklyn officials morphed into derision over the legal problems of two of them, State Senator Kevin Parker and Assembly Member Roger Green. It seems that nothing Mr. Ferrer does goes smoothly.

Mr. Ferrer was also slapped around in a devastating column in the New Republic (for which I was interviewed). Noam Scheiber raised questions about Mr. Ferrer’s core values or lack thereof, the kind of questions that can only hurt the former Bronx president among the Manhattan liberal crowd he must have in his coalition to win.

Lest anyone have missed the piece locally, it was picked up and reprinted in last Saturday’s New York Post as well, to give Mr. Ferrer an additional slap on the rebound.

Mr. Ferrer’s strength as the sole Latino candidate in the race is still unchallenged on the Democratic side. But Mr. Bloomberg is positioning himself to nibble at the edges of Mr. Ferrer’s advantage, by putting together a formidable Latino cadre of his own for November. Mr. Ferrer’s trick now is getting that far.

And there are only 26 weeks to go.