One week ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's expensive new campaign machine was humming along with Rolex precision. His poll numbers were at the highest since his post-victory honeymoon four years ago, and he was basking in the glow of test scores that suggested his educational policies were making headway in improving performance in the schools.
This week finds Mr. Bloomberg smarting badly as he tries to recover from what is one of the biggest defeats of his political life, the scuttling of the stadium proposal on Monday. A couple days later, there was the City Council's effective rejection of his ambitious 20-year plan to remove the city's trash by barges.
Such defeats might lead one to the conclusion that Mr. Bloomberg has lost the comfortable footing he had finally achieved this spring. But this is New York City politics, and, as is ever the case, things are not necessarily as they appear.
The battle over the mayor's garbage plan is set to resume next week if, as expected, the major vetoes the Council's decision. The prospect has given his team a new fight to wage at a time when it is eager for a distraction - any distraction - from the agonizing stadium loss.
As painful as the stadium defeat may have been to the mayor, some supporters and analysts say he could eventually turn it into a victory. Mr. Bloomberg's plan was an easy, reliable target for his likely Democratic opponents, and without it, his opponents could be left scrambling for new avenues of attack. They will not have his West Side stadium to kick around anymore, the argument goes.
"Unhitching yourself from an unpopular policy in the long run doesn't do a lot of damage," said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. "No one knows for sure, but certainly to have this decision in the first week of June is a lot better than the first week of November."
Democrats believe they can keep the stadium issue alive as a way to challenge the mayor's priorities. Marist is releasing a poll today that is expected to show at least a short-term drop in Mr. Bloomberg's public support in the wake of the stadium defeat. As Mr. Miringoff said, "A loss is a loss."
Mr. Bloomberg is not used to losing, and through much of his life he has been able to achieve seemingly quixotic goals through sheer, relentless drive, be it his rise to the top in Wall Street from a working-class start, his creation from scratch of the financial-news empire that made him a billionaire, or his surprisingly victorious long-shot bid for mayor.
Supporters acknowledge that his big loss on the stadium ranks up there with his firing from Salomon Brothers in 1981, which he credits with ultimately leading to the creation of Bloomberg L.P., though one aide pointed out that one was personal and the other was an administration loss.
Mr. Bloomberg has kept his game face on this week, vowing to push through his trash plan yesterday and promising not to let the stadium loss obscure the rest of the good work he says he is doing. He has made a show of joviality in the past few days.
"Look, there are a lot of things going on in this city that are wonderful," he said in response to a question yesterday at an endorsement announcement with the League of Conservation Voters. "We're not going to win on everything. This is something we will get through, and we'll do the best we can with everything else."
Several supporters and aides have said through the week that Mr. Bloomberg has asked his campaign and governmental teams to avoid wallowing in defeat or engaging in excessive postgame analysis.
"You've got to remember his mentality," said Edward Skyler, his communications director. "He's never interested in Monday-morning quarterbacking. He's always moving forward, he's always thinking about what we're doing next. He's not the type of guy who gets stuck in a rut."
Some supporters have said they hope he does take a lesson or two from these bumps in the road this week: both the stadium loss and the defeat of the garbage plan have shown how some of Mr. Bloomberg's greatest perceived assets - his businessman's unwillingness to engage in nuts-and-bolts politics and his apparent disdain for government's often slow deliberations - can also be among his greatest failings.
As Fran Reiter, a former top aide to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, put it earlier this week in relation to the stadium: "The mayor - as the straight-shooting tell-it-like-it-is nonpolitician - is admired, that's the upside. The downside is that if you are unwilling to play the political game you will inevitably run into problems, because your opponents relish playing that game."
In each case, the mayor failed to build the political support he needed for passage. And, in each, he was accused of trying to circumvent the usual governmental approvals only to bump up against leaders who ultimately blocked the plans because of what they said were the negative effects of the proposals on their home districts. In the case of the West Side development plan, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver worried that it would draw commercial tenants from the ground zero area, and in the case of the waste transfer plan, Council Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat running for the mayor's job, opposed his plan to place a waste transfer station in Mr. Gifford's East Side Council district.
Mr. Bloomberg's aides argue that they are two different cases. When it came to their garbage plan, they said, they consulted heavily with the City Council, although many council members argue that the particulars were already set in stone. With regard to the stadium, mayoral aides say Mr. Silver was immovable.
But they do not deny that they could badly use a victory about now. They predict that will come next week when they expect to resume the fight for his trash plan. Noting that the Council did not seem to have enough votes for an override of a veto as of late Thursday, Mr. Skyler said, "If it stays where it is, we win."