I'm guessing that right about now Mike Bloomberg views Sheldon Silver about as benignly as a cat views a mouse.
Mr. Silver destroyed the billionaire mayor's demented dream of using upwards of a billion dollars of the public's money to help finance a colossally expensive football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan for his billionaire buddy, Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets.
If you have $4 billion or $5 billion, as the mayor is reported to have, you can easily begin to think that everybody is for sale. Mr. Silver, a Democrat, is the speaker of the State Assembly, and his vote on an obscure three-member state board was crucial to the survival of the stadium deal. But Mayor Bloomberg didn't realize that at first.
When he found out, he didn't worry too much. Like a rich suitor relying on expensive jewels to woo a new love interest, the mayor began offering the speaker one deal after another for his Lower Manhattan Assembly district. Each deal was more valuable than the last.
It was insulting, and Mr. Silver - whose district includes ground zero, the former World Trade Center site - refused to give in.
When asked on Monday whether the stadium deal was dead, the speaker replied, with an awkward grin of victory, "It was never alive."
The mayor is reliably reported to be furious. I was told by a City Hall source who used extremely colorful language that Mr. Bloomberg would like to - how can I put this? - throttle the speaker.
O.K. Time for a deep breath. The mayor should chill. If he can get past his anger, he'll find that Mr. Silver did him a big favor.
This is an election year, and Mike Bloomberg, despite the stadium defeat, is on a roll. The latest F.B.I. statistics show that serious crime in New York, which was already the safest big city in America, continued to fall last year. Public school test scores have shown significant improvement, and for the first time in 15 years at least half of all elementary and middle-school students are performing at or above their grade level in reading and math.
While Mr. Bloomberg is hardly a beloved mayor, his poll numbers are up. And he has demonstrated his willingness to spend scores of millions of dollars of his own money on advertising for his re-election campaign.
As if that weren't enough, Mr. Bloomberg has the comfort of knowing he has an ace in the hole: his Democratic opponents. Anything can happen in politics. But at the moment, despite whatever they may say publicly, there are hardly any high-powered Democrats in New York who believe that Mr. Bloomberg can be defeated by anyone in the current field of Democratic candidates.
More significantly, there are an awful lot of influential Democrats who have quietly concluded that it is in their interest for Mr. Bloomberg to win. Their reasoning is as follows:
He hasn't been a terrible mayor. (In fact, he's really a Democrat in G.O.P. clothing.) He's given major financial support to many worthy causes. (Not to mention major jobs to many worthy friends and relatives.) And he's a lame duck, which means that he and his enormous piles of money will not be standing between aspiring Democrats and the doors to City Hall four years from now.
Democrats have high hopes that Eliot Spitzer will be elected governor next year and that perhaps William Thompson Jr., the city comptroller, will succeed Mr. Bloomberg in 2009.
With Mr. Thompson waiting in the wings, there is very little chance of big-time black support lining up enthusiastically for the current Democratic front-runner, Fernando Ferrer. There will be no black-Latino alliance similar to the historic coalition that just helped elect Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles.
The reluctance of Democrats to undermine Mr. Bloomberg's re-election bid prompted The Daily News to run a story recently that carried the headline:
"Big Dems Can't Help It - They Like Mike."
With all this going for him, the last thing Mr. Bloomberg needed was a disgraceful stadium deal - a giveaway of the public's money to a fellow billionaire - dogging him throughout the mayoral race. Sheldon Silver did him the favor of dispensing with that albatross.
Instead of nursing his anger at the speaker, Mayor Mike might think about the possibility of burying the hatchet --
Uh-oh. Bad metaphor.