Sobering news this AM for Democrats: Anthony Weiner, the scrappy Congressman from the Ninth District, is withdrawing from the mayoral race. Weiner lays out his reasoning in a Times Op-Ed.

[A] lot of people I have talked to have asked a different question: “How can you win?”

But for me, these have been side issues. What has animated me most during these past months is how much Washington has changed, and the potential for greater movement still. With a progressive sweep in all branches of the federal government, major economic reform, a new energy bill and an overhaul of health care ahead, this is a moment when ideas matter. I’ve had to evaluate what I could accomplish in Washington if I was in a heated campaign in New York City at the same time.

Weiner has a point, and it's the one that should be discussed. In the year 2009, and now presumably for another four or eight or forty years, Mayor Bloomberg is going to run this town as he sees fit. Even if he runs it into the ground, he has the money to still get himself elected as often as he wants. And why not? Now that the Council has overturned term limits, there's nothing to stop them from doing it again. It's not as if they face consequences at the ballot box, after all.

Chris Smith had a very smart piece in New York last week, mercilessly laying out the structural weaknesses of New York's City's party structure.

At a time when the city is poised to go through a wrenching transformation, Democrats aren’t even in the intellectual game at the mayoral level. The local party’s top leadership is calcified; its grassroots remain deeply, sentimentally attached to the Dinkins-era policy worldview. The city has been fortunate, mostly, that at the moment the man in charge is a progressive-minded plutocrat. Bloomberg’s predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, was regressive—and who’s to say that Bloomberg won’t become even more autocratic in a third term? The Democratic void increases the chances that someday soon the city will be run by a less- than-benevolent despot.

It really is stunning when you sit down and think about it: Democrats have an overwhelming majority in the House and, theoretically, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (as soon as Norm Coleman departs to the green fields of lobbying. Oh wait, he's already doing that). We also have a majority of statehouses and state legislatures. We even won a majority in our own state senate, something that hadn't happened in forty years.

But here, in the bluest city in the country, we are powerless. And it's our own damned fault.