Since the start of his second term, Mayor Bloomberg has been a public darling, with soaring approval ratings and support in the City Council.

In the last few days, as thousands of Queens residents muddled through the heat without electricity, Mr. Bloomberg has praised Consolidated Edison instead of joining the chorus of New Yorkers bashing the utility.

His stance has angered both residents and elected officials. While visiting Queens last week, Mr. Bloomberg was jeered as a “bum” by one resident for not ordering a more speedy city response, and yesterday three elected officials criticized his defense of Con Ed’s CEO, Kevin Burke.

“The mayor’s problem here is that he is not recognizing who is to blame and holding people accountable,” Assemblyman Michael Gianaris said. “To stand here and say that Con Ed is doing a good job is just mind-boggling.”

Those comments and others made by two council members, Eric Gioia and Peter Vallone Jr., who called for the resignation of Mr. Burke, were made in the Blue Room of City Hall immediately after the lawmakers stood behind the mayor while he delivered an update on the power outage.

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler rebuked the lawmakers immediately after the event for using the briefing as a platform to criticize the mayor. The mayor’s spokesman, Stuart Loeser, said the lawmakers are entitled to their opinions, but should not have come to his event if they planned to criticize him.

The attacks raise a larger question about how Mr. Bloomberg will weather the political storm that has accompanied the blackout, and if his approval rating, which was over 70% earlier this month, will slide.

Political analysts said Mr. Bloomberg would take some heat for the outage, but that the damage would probably not make a dent his political armor.

“He’s got popularity to give,” a political consultant, Scott Levenson, said. “There’s no mayor that’s ever been in a position to take a bullet like Bloomberg.”

In his first term, Mr. Bloomberg came under fire after closing firehouses and raising property taxes. But he turned that around and trounced his Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer, in last year’s election.

Yesterday, he said Mr. Burke “deserves a thanks” for all of the hard work he has done since the power was downed.

“Going after a CEO just because somebody wants to have somebody to blame doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Mr. Bloomberg, who is a former CEO, said.

Meanwhile, Governor Pataki criticized the utility in a letter to lawmakers, and the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who is running for governor as a Democrat, said the company “did not heed the warnings” from the blackouts in 1999 in Washington Heights.

A spokesman for Con Ed, Alfonso Quiroz, said Mr. Burke has no plans to resign and that the company is focused on restoring power to the roughly 2,000 remaining people.