A Campaign Season of Neglect, With Some Notable Exceptions

With Election Day upon us, New Yorkers can finally exhale. The long season of our being ignored by the presidential campaigns is finally over.

You have to say this about the candidates: They are tireless when it comes to paying us no attention, unless perhaps they need to extract cash from our millionaires, appear on a talk show, make obeisance to the cardinal or, if they're Republicans, cozy up for incomprehensible reasons to a television personality with an improbable hairdo.

But campaign among real New Yorkers? Not a chance, a fact of life for many years, as you know. Why should either major party labor hard in a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate other than Ronald Reagan in 40 years? Still, in the 2012 election, it feels as if we've been neglected more than is absolutely necessary.

You can tell things are bad when even the television evangelist Pat Robertson, who once sought the Republican presidential nomination, can' t be bothered to blame our wicked ways for Hurricane Sandy.

Where have you gone, Mr. Robertson?

There was a time when you really cared about us, like two days after 9/11. You agreed then with Jerry Falwell that God had punished us because of “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians.” Now we've been socked by a terrible storm, and do we hear from you? No. Come, now. Did Hurricane Sandy have nothing to do with New York's legalization of same-gender marriage?

It would be unfair, though, to say that the city was totally abandoned by White House aspirants. We had our moments. Let's recall some of the more glorious among them.

Newt Gingrich was inspiring. He couldn't resist curling his lip at “elites” in Manhattan, defined by him as people who live in high-rise buildings and who “ride the subway.” The elites apparently did not include the likes of himself, with his credi t line of a paltry $500,000 at Tiffany & Company.

Now that subway lines are steadily returning to pre-Sandy normality, you elites must be thrilled to have your luxury back. Some of you may even be New York public school janitors. Mr. Gingrich couldn't resist bopping you on the head as well, singling you out as being paid “an absurd amount of money because of the union.”

While Mr. Robertson didn't say much about storms, Representative Michele Bachmann picked up the slack. She weighed in on Hurricane Irene and a small earthquake that jolted us last year. They, Mrs. Bachmann said at a campaign stop, were God's way of telling American politicians, “Are you going to start listening to me here?”

She, Mr. Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney all came here to snuggle with the hairdo guy, the birther Donald Trump, or as the conservative commentator George Will preferred to call him, “this bloviating ignoramus.” No need to pursue that des cription any further. It speaks for itself.

Mr. Cain made clear his displeasure with the Occupy Wall Street protesters who had begun to camp out in Lower Manhattan. He knew exactly what they were about. “I don't have the facts to back this up,” he told The Wall Street Journal in early October last year, “but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration.”

Sure, why would anyone ever back up statements with facts?

Rick Santorum - remember him? - couldn't resist giving this city his own kick in the shins. Campaigning in Missouri, he all but likened New York and Los Angeles to Sodom and Gomorrah. “You live like most Americans in between those two cities,” he told his audience, “and you know the values you believe in.”

Then there is New York's own would-be president, the I'd-be-better-than-them-all former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Of late, M r. Giuliani has campaigned hard for Mr. Romney. Over the weekend he visited so-called battleground states and said of President Obama, “He should resign.”

They were hardly the first harsh words of the campaign from the former mayor. Last December, he talked about how he had “never seen a guy change his positions on so many things so fast - on a dime.”

No, not Mr. Obama. He was talking about Mr. Romney, whom he described as vulnerable to charges that he was “a man without a core” and “a man without substance.”

What, you mean to say you're not going to miss all this?

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com