NEARLY seven months into Eliot Spitzer’s stay at the governor’s mansion, the man who won 69 percent of the vote by declaring war on “the army of the status quo” is now leading it – boosting spending, cutting backroom deals and dressing up minor accomplishments as major reforms.

Consider Spitzer’s latest “change”: a package deal that combined a campaign-finance reform so weak that the Republican state senators it’s meant to push from office happily endorsed it, and a commission to study congestion pricing, many of whose members will be appointed by the Democratic Assembly that just derailed the plan.

In exchange for these half-measures, he’s suggested he’ll give legislators a raise for going “a very long way toward enacting the reform agenda that I laid out.” At this point, the new governor has taken on the Democratic Assembly over the appointment of a new comptroller, the Republican Senate over campaign-finance reform and both houses of the Legislature over the budget – and lost each fight.

But the biggest disappointment has come on the fiscal front.

As a candidate, Spitzer earned support from fiscal conservatives by warning about “the perfect storm of unaffordability” due to blow into New York, which is highly dependent on marginal tax revenues from Wall Street and the super wealthy to make ends meet year to year – always just one market downturn from a crisis. Yet as governor, his first budget proposed a more than 8 percent spending increase, twice the rate of inflation and even steeper than those of his profligate predecessor.

As E.J. McMahon, director of the Manhattan Institute Empire Center for Public Policy and one of just a handful of people who actually understands the purposefully impenetrable New York state budget, explains: “A lot of people, including the Legislature, were surprised by Spitzer’s pretty significant spending increase.”

Incredibly, Spitzer spun his budget as a victory for fiscal conservatism to a mostly credulous press corps, boasting that the Legislature, which generally pushes the governor’s proposed budget upward, had added little to his. He didn’t mention that this was because he’d volunteered most everything they wanted. The result, says McMahon, is that “New York doesn’t need a bear market with a 2,000 point drop to be in real trouble – just for growth to stall.”

Even where Spitzer has fought to rein in spending, he’s failed to deliver. Take his plan to fix the state’s Medicaid program, one of the largest and fastest-growing parts of the state budget, which costs more than the programs of California and Texas combined while often providing low-quality health care. His reform proposal raised the ire of SEIU Local 1199, the politically potent health-care-workers union, which launched a TV and mail operation attacking it. Spitzer offered an unprecedented and gutsy response, spending rolled-over campaign funds on TV ads of his own touting the plan.

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