Primary Lesson: Bloomberg Can Buy Off Nearly Anyone Out There

Secondary lesson — disregard most of what Howard Wolfson ever says:

As a master strategist for the New York Democratic Party, Mr. Wolfson worked with a handful of other elite party operatives to lay out a grand plan to defeat Mr. Bloomberg in the 2005 mayoral race, writing in an internal memo, “Michael Bloomberg is an out-of-touch billionaire who can’t relate to the problems of ordinary New Yorkers.”

When the mayor tried to impose nonpartisan elections in the city, Mr. Wolfson called it a “cynical power grab.” When he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to bankroll his re-election, Mr. Wolfson said such spending “distorts the terms of the debate.” He impugned Mr. Bloomberg’s attempt to build a West Side stadium (an “out-of whack-priority”) and even criticized his beloved “Gates,” the saffron cloth panels arrayed through Central Park by the artist Christo (“shmattes on sticks”).

And when some prominent Democrats defected to the Bloomberg camp that year, Mr. Wolfson cried foul, declaring himself personally dismayed by their disloyalty.

This year, Mr. Bloomberg is again spending tens of millions of dollars to run for re-election on the Republican ballot line against a Democratic opponent. But this time, Mr. Wolfson is a senior architect of the effort.

Mr. Wolfson’s conversion has become a source of fascination and dismay among New York Democrats, who are now on the other end of the cutting brand of politics he perfected as a chief strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the city, he is credited in political circles with pressuring Representative Anthony D. Weiner, a Democrat, to quit the mayor’s race. The switch has been cited as an example of how the billionaire mayor, who is prepared to spend as much as $100 million of his own money to win a third term, can buy the silence of even his most ardent critics — an assertion summarily dismissed by Mr. Wolfson, whose consulting firm is earning $40,000 a month from the campaign.

Third lesson — the people who flock to Bloomberg are cheap dates, yes-people who tie their careers and legacies to the most powerful in a way that Niccolo Machiavelli would approve of:

Mr. Wolfson said in an interview at the Bloomberg campaign complex in Midtown that he was as surprised as anyone to be where he was, but he described himself as one of many Democrats who have come to admire the mayor — and said such political conversions are the best testament to the cross-party allure of Mr. Bloomberg’s nonideological way of governing.

Still, there is an alternate view: that Mr. Wolfson, reeling from Mrs. Clinton’s demoralizing loss, and an object of scorn among some Obama loyalists for the attacks he waged long after it became clear that she had no chance of winning, saw in Mr. Bloomberg an easy, high-profile victory.

“I am not interested in losing,” he said.

Fourth lesson — anything these people say is the pinnacle of debate club-style bullshit:

It has also been intriguing for people to watch Mr. Wolfson explain away things he once declared outrageous, like the mayor’s campaign spending.

On a Friday afternoon in the spring, he gathered a group of reporters in Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign headquarters to share the news that the mayor had spent $18 million in the first few months of his re-election effort. The announcement spurred the kind of questions Mr. Wolfson himself once so pointedly asked, like whether the mayor was trying to buy the election. Mr. Wolfson knocked down the questions in stride, and did not seem the least bit fazed by the contradictions.

“They don’t pay me,” he said in an interview that day, “to disagree with the mayor.”

Fifth lesson — it’s also easy to stop this. Just refuse — no matter how many glossy circulars you get about “jobs” or “honesty” or how many commercials you see about the man who “sees rooftops” or how many editorial boards endorse* (the latest suckup comes from the Queens Chronicle) — to vote for Bloomberg. And with any luck people like Howard Wolfson will go down with him, too.

*But remember that there are heroic beat reporters who don’t agree and will stand up to the mayor by continuing to ask the inconvenient questions . . . these people (Times Metro reporters, Observer reporters and at least someone at the Voice, too, as well as at least two editorial writers) are the last line of defense and deserve our attention and respect. (This does not apply to the New York Post, which has proved very capable of carrying water for Bloomberg.) When everyone from the rich to the non-profit sector and the unions to political operatives like Howard Wolfson have totally rolled over, reporters are all we have left.