The More Things Change, The More They Stay So Lame . . . As In “Duck” (Please, Mayor — Give It Up!)

Clyde Haberman reports from the mayor’s state of the city speech:

On one level, it was a bread-and-butter recitation of what Mr. Bloomberg saw as his accomplishments and what he hoped to do in the two years he has left at City Hall: with policing and fire protection, education, health, housing, economic development and so on.

But there was another level, and it practically screamed, “Hey, don’t rule me out in 2008.” His constant travels — the schedule this weekend puts him in California and Texas, two states dripping with electoral votes — can only feed assumptions that he is toying with a third-party candidacy.

He wasted little time on Thursday to slip in the buzzword of the year: change. All the presidential candidates say they want to be change agents so badly that the eventual losers might think about looking for work in a movie theater box office.

For himself, Mr. Bloomberg suggested he would be better at innovation than the others. “We can improve and be the beneficiary of change, not its victim,” he said.