The negative tone of Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection effort must signify that there is concern in the Bloomberg camp over Comptroller Thompson’s surprising strength with just over two weeks to go in the campaign.

It could be that the Bloomberg camp is really worried that, despite the advantage it has in money and institutional support, Mr. Thompson is gaining and could pull off a surprise upset. Alternatively, the campaign may be a reflection of the nasty side of Michael Bloomberg. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised were the negative ads and their sheer volume having a reverse effect, turning voters off to Mr. Bloomberg.

Certainly I can’t recall a more negative effort here than the Bloomberg campaign. Even if one doesn’t feel that Mr. Thompson is the best man to run the city, he is hardly the incompetent corrupt machine pol that he is being portrayed as. Just the opposite.

He is a smart, decent fellow who has made significant civic contributions to his city. His service as Board of Education president, a thankless task, was admirable. It can be argued that Mr. Thompson’s tenure marked a high point in educational progress for our children.

Test scores were legitimately rising in those innocent days before “No Child Left Behind” mandates were driving the State Education Department to begin the disgraceful “dumbing down” of tests to gin up scores that we’ve seen in the last few years.

Mayor Bloomberg’s contention that under the old decentralized system of school boards, there was corruption and confusion is true, but up to a point. He neglects to mention the role of Mr. Thompson and the chancellor at the time, Rudy Crew, in winning a major overhaul of the system by the legislature that, in effect, ended the powers of the local boards over hiring and put the local boards under that Chancellor, far more of an educator than Mr. Bloomberg’s chancellor, Joel Klein.

Even diminished in power, those local boards played an important role. The Bloomberg “reform” comes at the cost of the loss of public engagement with their schools. Parents and communities were more involved then and had at least some say in basic decisions regarding their children’s education. There was a district office to handle grievances that went beyond the school level and a superintendent to take responsibility. There was something in all this called “democracy,” a triennial school board election that gave the public input over local school policy.

These elections were criticized because in some areas of the city voter turnout was low. Well, voter turnout was pretty low in the recent primaries for City Council. In this one-party town the primary is the determiner of who sits on that so-called legislative body. I don’t see calls to eliminate the Council (though, hmmmm, now that I think of it . . .).

We could have engaged a lot more voters had we scheduled school board contests during the November election rather than in a separate plebiscite in May. Certainly that would have been a better idea than throwing out the boards altogether, denying to residents of the city a right — to elect local school boards — practiced in virtually every town and village in the state. If you believe that less democracy is better than more, a linchpin of the Bloomberg mayoralty most dramatically exhibited in the battle to thwart the voters will on term limits, than this is all fine.

In any event, despite the crescendo of innuendo coming from the mayor’s campaign staff, there has never been even the hint of corruption on the part of Mr. Thompson. Not in his tenure on the education board, where he received but a token salary, nor in the conduct of his office as Comptroller.

While New York City’s retirement fund investments haven’t exactly thrived in recent years, one can hardly blame Mr. Thompson for the world-wide economic downturn. The mayor, a fellow who doesn’t seem at all shy in offering his advice on any number of issues including the type of oil used to prepare French fries (and indeed whether we should even eat French fries) sits on all of the pension boards. I don’t recall the richest man in New York offering any suggestions how we might do better.

And that is what has been lost in the sea of Bloomberg negativity on Mr. Thompson’s record. The real issue in this campaign is the city’s fragile economic health. The editorial boards told us last year that the mayor is the indispensible man to lead us in these difficult times, yet he has failed to make the tough decisions to right a ship that is still listing.

The mayor, in fact, has been weighing us down further with outrageously generous contracts to the municipal unions, a time-honored vote getting tradition here (progress, not politics?). He has raised taxes and fees and piled mandates on the backs of small businesses. How long can we count on being bailed out by our bankrupt state government and scrip from Washington?

Mr. Bloomberg tells us of his five borough economic plan, but what of the 300 local small supermarkets that have been forced out of business during his watch? What of the still rising unemployment figures? Where has his “plan” been these past seven and half years?

That, and not mud flung at Mr. Thompson, are the questions to be raised in these final two weeks of campaigning.