Spitzer's tough year; Governor's missteps stalled agenda but 2008 can bring strong recovery

If 2007 was difficult for Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer, the difficulties were largely his own. The governor, with the help of his aides, made his own bed.

True, Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno has had unseemly fun bouncing on it, gleefully helping to drive Spitzer's once soaring popularity into the dumps, but ultimately, the governor's tale is an old one: He was brought low by hubris.

But this governor is still the governor the state's voters gave a strong mandate, even if his approach to governance has been flawed by a misunderstanding of how to get the job done in Albany. The consequence of that misunderstanding has been the rejection of some of his priority issues, and his public approval ratings have been deflated as well.

Spitzer's steamroller stalled twice this year -- first, when aides used state police to try to document the misuse of state aircraft by Bruno, and second, when he cavalierly announced that he was imposing a new state policy to provide driver's licenses to illegal aliens. Each politically disastrous incident is instructive because in neither case was Spitzer or his aides without cause.

Bruno really was misusing state helicopters, though legally. He took trips on them and billed taxpayers by mixing a minuscule amount of state business with the largely political purposes of the flights. It was an abuse of discretion that richly deserved exposure.

On illegal aliens, good reasons exist to provide all drivers with licenses and, hence, responsibility for insurance. That helps to provide a level of safety on the road.

Again, the plan failed largely because of arrogance. Spitzer thought that because it made a certain sense and because he won his office with a historic majority, he could unilaterally impose it over objections of other politicians and ordinary New Yorkers, many of whom weren't convinced that giving licenses to illegal aliens was the way to discourage them from coming. He couldn't.

The consequences have been disastrous, for Spitzer and for New Yorkers who wanted him to take on the critical task of fixing a broken state government that overtaxes its residents while coddling its tax-writers. A recent poll by the Sienna Research Institute found that 51 percent of registered voters view Spitzer unfavorably, compared to only 10 percent when he took office in January.

Yet contained in his failures of leadership are hints that Spitzer could turn things around. For one, he has good ideas, ones that go beyond cracking down on the abuse of state aircraft and ensuring that drivers are licensed. He led the reform of the workers' compensation system, involving both the Business Council and the AFL-CIO. If he can gain cooperation from those two contending groups, he should be able to forge partnerships anywhere.

Spitzer also led an effort to restructure school aid so that it is more fairly distributed, although more reforms still are needed in that area. And the state still needs a far more open budget process, after last year's followed the deplorable routine of three-men-in-a-room horse-trading to raise state spending by even more than the inflation-topping 6.3 percent hike Spitzer had proposed.

Spitzer's scheduled State of the State address in January will be followed by a first-ever State of Upstate speech in Buffalo. The speech here will be crucial both for this area and for the governor, who has said he will measure his administration's progress by what he has accomplished for upstate New York.

If the governor stumbled because of arrogance, the opening of that speech could go a long way to re-establishing momentum by including a genuine apology, or at least an acknowledgment, for the missteps that slowed his agenda. Nothing wins forgiveness more than a reformed sinner.

But even beyond that, both the administration and the Legislature still must curb the state's spending spree. A sizable deficit looms here, and elsewhere states, including California, are discussing spending cuts of up to 10 percent. Legislators in particular can't just add to the tally with vote-currying district spending, like children spending other people's money in a toy store. That must stop.