Off-year elections always take on a little more significance than they deserve, although observers of this year’s contests may come away mainly scratching their heads.

While the Democrats took away a couple of gubernatorial seats formerly held by Republicans, the GOP in turn held onto one of the highest visibility jobs in the country, in a city where Republicans are outnumbered four-to-one. But then it’s not clear how much of a Republican Michael Bloomberg, who was just elected mayor of New York, really is.

Bloomberg, the billionaire financial information mogul, joined the party only about a year ago, mainly to avoid a bruising primary campaign, and rode a torrent of his own money to narrow victory aided by the late-but-strong endorsement of the incumbent, Rudy Giuliani.

Political observers have been looking to this year’s election for indications of what might be looming in next year’s mid-term elections, when control of both the House and the Senate are likely to be in play. Eight years earlier, during the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, there was a powerful signal of what was to come when the Republicans swept all four high visibility races—Los Angeles mayor, New York mayor, New Jersey governor and Virginia governor. A year later, Republicans captured Congress and a majority of the gubernatorial seats.

Democrats had hoped for a similar sweep this time around and nearly got it. After capturing the mayor’s office in Los Angeles earlier in the year, Democrats won both of the governorships. But Bloomberg’s ambiguous victory makes it all a bit harder to interpret. In a nation where political differences have been muted by the campaign against fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, one should probably be careful about detecting trends too easily.

If there is any good news for the Democrats this year, it lies in the systematic ineptitude of the Republicans. For the Republicans, the two gubernatorial losses are both reasons for embarrassment, and indeed dissension is mounting in the party over the leadership of outgoing Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore as national party chairman. Mark Warner, a conservative Democrat, narrowly defeated Mark Earley to succeed Gilmore in a race marked by a mainly lethargic Republican performance against a Democrat who blunted most of the hot-button issues that Republicans like to run on. Virginia has largely trended Republican in recent years.

In New Jersey, party hack Jim McGreevey throttled conservative Republican Bret Schundler for an easy victory. Schundler had built a national reputation as an innovative mayor in Jersey City and was a potential figure on the national stage if he had won. However, his optimistic Jack Kemp-style conservatism never really got a fair hearing, largely because Schundler spent most of the campaign being undercut by the leadership of his own party, including the active hostility of the acting Republican governor.

However, Bloomberg’s victory is probably the most interesting of the races, even though it’s probably the least significant in terms of national political trends. The race, of course, occurred in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that temporarily reshaped the ethos of the city and obscured much of the campaign. The attacks resuscitated the career of Giuliani, who rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center as a hero of dignity, honesty and restraint.

The cheap wisdom on Bloomberg’s victory is that the $50 million of his own money that he poured into the campaign was the reason he won, but there’s always more to it than that. The political graveyards are littered with the corpses of free-spending millionaires and special interest stooges who failed to transform money into public support.

To be sure, Bloomberg never showed much in the way of campaign skills, and he had a tendency to step into things that a more seasoned veteran of the political wars might have stepped around. In one celebrated campaign event, he even set New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, to cringing when—after getting Pataki’s support—Bloomberg declared himself to be a “liberal.” But voters may have also approved of his promise to be someone who would get things done—“A leader, not a politician,” as his slogan went—and cut him some slack for not mastering the superficialities of politics.

Bloomberg’s victory came over long-time New York political figure Mark Green, a former Ralph Nader acolyte who served in the city’s distinctly odd position of public advocate. The job is something between public scold and ombudsman and is truly suited to an instinctive media hog like Green. But when the nut-cutting time came, Green showed himself to lack the heft for the real job of leading the city.

There is a lesson here about government and politics. Many talented people from other fields of endeavor have entered politics assuming that it couldn’t be that hard—a judgment that is usually based on the impression they get when they meet their elected leaders. More often than not, they learn that being a good candidate may not be a great art, but that it is a difficult one.

Bloomberg’s victory in some measure parallels the experience of Phil Bredesen in Nashville. Bredesen, of course, didn’t have as much money as Bloomberg—or as large a personality—but then Nashville is a smaller place. When Bredesen ran for mayor in 1987, he conducted a stumbling, uncertain campaign against one of the most talented campaigners in the country. In all that’s happened in the intervening years, people in Nashville mostly have forgotten just how good a retail politician Bill Boner was. Boner prevailed, although the muscle of Bredesen’s resources made the race much closer than Boner would have liked.

In the subsequent four years, Boner ran an administration that was at times inept and sometimes just unlucky. Within four years, the city practically begged for Bredesen. After the 1991 election, Bredesen demonstrated that being good in business is actually a pretty solid preparation for succeeding in government. While he only got somewhat more personable over time, he was powerfully clever at reasoning on his feet and getting things settled in closed rooms.

That is what New York can hope for from Bloomberg. It certainly has a tough time ahead of it. With the damage to the financial district and oncoming national recession, the city faces a time of austerity with declining revenues and the prospect of having to sharply cut services. While the talk is that the city needs to rebuild—and new office buildings will get built—the real rebuilding that Bloomberg must oversee relates to the tax base. That means building a strong new organism. That’s a much tougher task than building a few edifices.