ALBANY, June 22 — This time, Gov. Eliot Spitzer did not blink.

In April, the governor was criticized even by fellow Democrats for cutting an overly generous deal with Senate Republicans, weakening his main proposals to pass a timely budget.

This week, the governor faced another high-stakes negotiation with legislative leaders as they rushed to finish their session. This time, he drew a line in the sand around his top priority: a plan to overhaul state campaign finance laws.

But while the approach was different, it was not clear that the outcome was any better for the governor. The Senate balked at the governor’s plan and the session stumbled to a familiar Albany close, with talks on several major initiatives, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to reduce traffic in Manhattan, collapsing into finger-pointing. State approval of the mayor’s plan is now in doubt.

The governor said a session of “enormous potential” ended with “significant disappointment.”

As is often the case, Mr. Spitzer, a former attorney general, was a picture of defiance. “We will wait, we will fight for our positions and we will prevail in due course,” he said in an interview.

The governor said he felt compelled to stand firm on campaign finance reform because it was central to his campaign pledge to change what he considered the corrupt ways of Albany. He vowed to travel to the districts of Republican senators in the coming weeks to pressure them to resolve unfinished business during a special session next month.

“If we don’t resolve the flow of money into politics, we will not get legitimate decision-making,” he said. “Until we make serious headway in that regard, we won’t begin to confront some of the structural issues that I’m here to resolve.”

The Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, the state’s top Republican, said that the public did not care about campaign finance reform, and that the governor’s plan favored the incumbent governor’s party — in this case, the Democrats.

“I think it’s sad for the people of New York State that here on the closing day of the session the governor establishes a position that nothing happens unless we get agreement on campaign finance reform,” Mr. Bruno said.

“Now I don’t know about you, in your lives, when you get up in the morning — do your children, your significant others ask you what’s the status of campaign finance reform?”

There were accomplishments in the governor’s first six months in office. He expanded a state-financed health insurance program to ensure coverage of nearly one million uninsured children in the state. He and lawmakers increased property tax relief by $1.3 billion. He made cuts to Medicaid and increased education spending by $1.76 billion. And after a secretive budget process this spring, he began holding weekly public meetings with top lawmakers.

But he fell short on a number of his campaign promises, including his pledge to clean up Albany — making state government “ethical and wise,” as he put it in his inaugural address. Six months after he gave that speech, campaign finance reform is stalled and a new public integrity commission he has championed is seen as flawed by watchdog groups. The new commission merges the existing ethics and lobbying commissions. The merger will eliminate the job of arguably the only aggressive ethics enforcer in Albany, David Grandeau, director of the Temporary Commission on Lobbying.

In fighting hard for campaign finance reform, even to the point of causing a stalemate on other major issues, the governor may yet win support from voters who expected him to live up to his feisty reputation. But he also risks appearing ineffective, analysts say. And having set expectations for change high, he may have also disappointed many people.

“Pataki set the expectation bar very low, and if he accomplished anything, everyone thought that was great,” Russ Haven, the legislative counsel of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said of former Gov. George E. Pataki. “I think the governor’s experiencing some of the harsh judgments of high expectations,” said Mr. Haven, whose group has supported a number of Mr. Spitzer’s proposals.

Edmund J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative group, said, “The hype and the rhetoric was all about tremendous, dramatic, earthshaking change, and it’s hard to find any evidence of that.”

“His principal achievement was convincing the Legislature to spend a lot more money on schools, which is hardly a heavy lift,” he said.

In the end, three issues that were linked ultimately failed to coalesce into a deal — campaign finance reform, the congestion pricing plan and a pay raise for lawmakers. The governor said that a deal was close on congestion pricing before negotiations collapsed Thursday night.

Mayor Bloomberg has proposed to charge most drivers entering Manhattan below 86th Street on weekdays. Legislation floated by Mr. Spitzer would have given the city the authority to maintain the geographic boundaries of its proposal and set the fee, among other things, according to city officials. It also would have established a commission to review implementation of the plan, including how revenues would be used, and to study the impact of traffic on outside communities.

Whether this deal can be revived is unclear. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the most vocal skeptic of the plan, was again expressing concerns after the deal collapsed. The mayor, he said, “wants the authority to set a zone, and he wants the authority to purchase the equipment that’s necessary to implement his plan; he does not want anybody else’s view considered.” Mr. Bloomberg has continued to court Assembly support.

Amid the fighting over campaign finance reform, a number of issues have been thrown into limbo. Those ranged from the governor’s proposal to expand DNA collection to people convicted of all crimes to setting new age restrictions on purchasing violent and sexually explicit video games. Proposals including Mr. Spitzer’s plan to bolster state abortion laws in the wake of a Supreme Court decision restricting a disputed abortion procedure were not even the subject of serious talks.

So fractured was the end of the session that Mr. Bruno even backed away from a previously announced agreement with Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Silver to overhaul the Wicks Law, which requires multiple contractors on public construction projects, driving up costs.

The governor said he was looking forward to governing without the Legislature, which is expected to return briefly in mid-July to salvage remaining issues. He said he would focus on managing the state through executive agencies and focus on prominent projects in Manhattan like rebuilding Ground Zero and developing Moynihan Station. “We’re making those decisions without legislative input, by and large,” he said. “There is an unbelievable opportunity now to govern through the agencies, and that’s frankly what I’m really looking forward to.”

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