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WHILE I was visiting New York recently, my friend suggested that I join her as a volunteer on Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign. Better not, I thought. My previous experience of such work had been both brief and inglorious. When Mary Robinson ran for president, I offered to drive voters to the polls. As it turned out, I had only one passenger. Just as well, for as I helped him out of the car, the elderly man dented my enthusiasm by announcing that he was now going to vote for Brian Lenihan. It was the way he added darkly that he’d changed his mind that set off the twinge of guilt: had I said something wrong?

At the Bloomberg Headquarters, I did attend a briefing for leaders of the African community, now one of the fastest growing in the city. They were exercised that the campaign had not produced a separate poster for them, on the lines of those targeted to a huge range of groups, from Albanians to Venezuelans. As newly arrived immigrants (apart from respect for their differences from African Americans), what they wanted most of all were good schools and support for small businesses: both important themes of Bloomberg’s earlier terms of office.