“With the way that he’s playing this right now, it features all the things that we like least about Michael Bloomberg,” said David S. Birdsell, dean of the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College. “It features him as the testy, hard-to-satisfy critic of candidates who are already in the race, and it buttresses, the longer this goes on, the aloof critic role we might associate with a billionaire above the political fray rather than the dedicated politician and competent manager.”

Adding to the potential for national ennui, Mr. Birdsell said, was “the very long and frustrating Fred Thompson dance over the summer,” which reduced the tolerance for indecision.

“That is going to make everybody considerably more focused on getting him to declare and to not have an erosion of enthusiasm that Fred Thompson experienced,” he said.

Closer to home, though, the impatience is already palpable, and could grow as the city’s economic situation turns more dire. After five years of ballooning surpluses, the Independent Budget Office last week projected a $3.1 billion deficit in 2009 and $4.6 billion in 2010, driven by the housing slump and softening Wall Street profits.

“There’s been a sea change where we’re moving into choppier fiscal waters that we haven’t had to navigate before,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. With the convergence of what is shaping up to be a painful budget process this month and the presidential campaign calendar, he said, “they’re going to have to show their cards.”

“He has this great political good will,” he said, “but this is the day-to-day work of being the mayor and it’s going to be hard to do the day-to-day work while slipping off to Oklahoma, unless we New Yorkers know what the program is.”

George Arzt, a political consultant who was press secretary to Mayor Edward I. Koch, said that Mr. Bloomberg was risking the political fate of Mayor John V. Lindsay, whose 1972 presidential campaign took a hit when Brooklyn’s powerful Democratic Party boss, Meade H. Esposito, urged him to end his cross-country campaigning and address the city’s growing economic ills.