Mr. Republican.

THE good news is just pouring out of Albany these days, in sound bites and press releases that tout the accomplishments of Gov. George Pataki: "The income tax has been reduced! Property-tax relief is coming! There are 200,000 fewer welfare recipients, and 146,000 new jobs! Crime is down! Spending has slowed!"

It's a new New York, drifting away from the grandiose statism of Mario Cuomo, and toward something more subdued. As Tom Carroll of CHANGE-NY observes, a new atmosphere has put the Democrats "on the defensive for the first time in 15 years."

All this even has some of Pataki's supporters looking past his re-election bid in 1998 to bigger and better things. "The governor has generated a lot of excitement in the national party," says New York Republican Chairman William Powers, "and I certainly think he has the ability and charisma to run for President and win."

Even conservative journalists are touting the governor. Syndicated columnist Joseph Perkins predicted shortly after the 1996 Republican Convention that Pataki would be "one of the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000." William Tucker forecast in The Weekly Standard last fall that Pataki would find Washington "a piece of cake." And just recently James Pinkerton theorized in Newsday that Pataki could set to rights a "Republican Party that has lost two presidential elections in a row because it was seen as unduly influenced by Sunbelt-based Buchananites and Christian Coalitioneers."

Despite the enthusiasm he generates, George Pataki is viewed more in terms of what he is not -- a Cuomo liberal, a "Buchananite" --than of what he is. What in fact is he?

When George Pataki first entered the spotlight three years ago, he was an undistinguished state senator, hand-picked by Sen. Alfonse D'Amato as the pro-choice Catholic who could steal the apostate vote from Cuomo. There was little indication that he would have much to say to conservatives.

Once elected, however, the governor pushed for an income-tax cut and a long-awaited death penalty, and put the brakes on runaway spending. Perhaps -- as predicted by one insider, who claimed that Pataki's hero is Barry Goldwater -- the governor would distance himself from the unsavory D'Amato after all?

That hope was dashed last fall. While conservatives in other states were pushing tax-limitation initiatives, term limits, and even an end to racial quotas, Gov. Pataki, Sen. D'Amato, and several environmental activists put together, and stumped vigorously for, a $1.75-billion environmental-bond act.

The act was sold to the voters as necessary to clean up certain polluted parts of the state -- despite the fact that such clean-ups, if truly necessary, could have been accomplished using normal budget allocations, as even some liberal Democrats observed. The measure also left two-thirds of the funds unassigned to any specific project, to be spent later at the politico's discretion. Translation: the bond act was a big, greasy piece of pork at a time when New York already labors under a per-capita debt that is more than double the national average -- $3,582 to $1,579 in 1994 -- and has a debt rating which is one of the nation's worst.

Conservatives should not have been so surprised. For nearly a year before the election, they had been urging Pataki to fight for control of the Assembly, and to bring more principled Republicans into the GOP-run state Senate. Yet Pataki hardly ever mentioned the need for legislative assistance. Consequently, the GOP actually lost one seat -- ensuring that the governor's most "drastic" proposals will be diluted by the Assembly for the remainder of his term.

The governor seems disturbingly comfortable with the state's massive system of off-budget debt, spending, and patronage. Despite a constitutional requirement that all long-term debt be approved by the voters, back-door borrowing flourishes in New York, through numerous public authorities run by the party in power. And it doesn't seem to matter which party that is. Nelson Rockefeller was the father of this system, and Mario Cuomo brought it to new heights by having the state sell itself its own roads and prisons to patch up huge budget deficits.

Rather than taking on this system (made up of dubious-sounding agencies like the United Nations Development Corporation, and the New York Energy Research and Development Authority, which spend in excess of $12 billion annually), Pataki has followed tradition and filled it with cronies. In fact, some of the state's highest-profile conservatives -- like George Marlin (Port Authority) and former Assembly Minority Leader Clarence Rappleyea (New York Power Authority) -- can thank Pataki for their $175,000 salaries.

PATAKI'S reputation as a fiscal conservative, then, comes from on-budget spending, which he has increased more slowly than inflation. Supporters like to point out that even Michigan Gov. John Engler has not done that. Pataki's first budget hiked spending just 2.3 per cent, though his second budget lost ground, with spending increases of 3.9 per cent. That budget originally called for just a $500-million increase in expenditures, but an election-year porkfest by both Republicans and Democrats in the state legislature, for everything from bike paths to ballparks, added $2 billion.

In exchange for the pork, Pataki got workers'-compensation reform, which has been praised as a major accom- plishment. However, with New York's workers' comp costing an estimated 57 per cent above the national average (according to the Public Policy Institute), the governor's projected cut of 25 per cent leaves a lot of ground to be made up.

Pataki's proposed 1997 - 98 budget, a whopping $66.1 billion, calls for a spending hike of a little more than 2 per cent. The latest budget also completes the final stage of the governor's vaunted personal-income-tax cut. Assuming Pataki's budget survives in the Assembly, the top individual income-tax rate will drop to 6.85 per cent. That is just a hair below the 7 per cent rate which Cuomo signed into law and then reneged on.

Pataki's supporters like to say his income-tax cut is "the biggest tax cut in the nation's history." However, the size of New York's economy naturally makes this tax cut large in total dollar terms. The more legitimate measure of a tax cut is how much tax rates are reduced. By this measure, Pataki's tax cut is not large at all. Furthermore, New York's top income-tax rate will still exceed the average for the other 49 states by 25 per cent. What's more, the state's corporate tax rate (9 per cent) ranks among the nation's highest. And New York also levies a destructive capital-gains tax, which even after the Pataki cut will top the other 49 states' average by 38 per cent.

Pataki is also very quietly proposing (no press releases here) to stay the elimination of a 17 per cent Metropolitan Transit Authority surcharge on business taxes levied in the New York City area due to expire at the end of 1997. This amounts to a four-year business-tax hike of over $2 billion. The governor also has agreed to an extension of a 12.5 per cent surcharge on New York City's personal income tax, as requested by his fellow Republican, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

So, no additional income-tax relief is in sight. Instead, the governor has proposed going after the state's hated local property taxes, which are linked to some of the most costly, inefficient public schools in the nation. Pataki wants to phase in over four years a cut in local school taxes amounting to $1.7 billion. But his plan is simply to make up for those lost revenues with state dollars -- not to mention an additional $1.7 billion increase in state aid.

What's more, each school district will be allowed to boost school taxes by up to 4 per cent a year, and more if enrollment rises, or if new building in the district boosts property-tax revenues, or if voters give two-thirds approval. So, without deep spending reductions at the state level, this property-tax "cut" is really a tax shift -- and a potential tax increase. (As of this writing, Pataki says he will attempt to wrest from the hands of the legislature a newly discovered state surplus, variously estimated at anywhere between $650 million and $2 billion, to speed implementation of his property-tax cut. The showdown will come during the annual budget battle in Albany.)

To his credit Pataki has called for charter schools. Unfortunately, the Assembly already supports charter schools, with a twist. Legislators of both parties -- under pressure from the state's powerhouse teacher unions -- want "teacher certification," i.e., mandatory indoctrination into the sorts of educational fads that have already pushed New York's average per-pupil cost to $9,175, compared with a national average of $5,767. If charter schools are to work, Pataki will have to risk considerable political capital fighting the unions, something he has shown little proclivity for.

The governor's declarations that New York has become a job-creating juggernaut (ready to "roar into the twenty-first century") also sound hollow. While private firms are creating jobs, the annual rate of private-sector job creation continues to lag well behind the national average -- 0.62 per cent in New York versus 1.62 per cent nationwide in 1996. What the state needs is tax and regulatory cuts far deeper than Pataki or anyone else in Albany currently contemplates.

While Pataki has had his successes (as CHANGE-NY's Tom Carroll points out, the changes in policy and rhetoric on welfare from Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani have produced "two hundred thousand fewer welfare recipients . . . nothing to sneeze at") the real test will be in a second term -- assuming he wins one. "On taxes he's adopted one of the largest tax cuts in the nation's history, but at the end of the day there's a lot more that needs to be done, particularly on the income-tax cut." Carroll also called Pataki's $1.7-billion increase in funding for public education "unhelpful."

New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison, a respected social conservative, is also ambivalent about the governor. He gives him an A for economic per- formance but a C for his environmental-bond act and an F for his lack of leadership on a partial-birth-abortion ban, which Pataki meekly said he would sign if it "reached his desk." It did not last year, and looks as if it will not again this spring.

SO WHO is Gov. Pataki? Despite the hoopla, he fits the profile of the Northeast establishment Republican: He is willing to reduce taxes some, but unwilling to cut government deeply. He is willing to make marginal changes in education, yet has increased education spending as an election looms (New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman and Mayor Giuliani are doing the same). He is willing to spend lavishly on government environmental schemes and is outspokenly pro-choice on abortion. As Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council notes, "A Pataki type of Republican may in fact be exactly the right kind of candidate for Governor of New York. . . . but to run for a national campaign the . . . profile would have to be different."

There is no doubt that Al D'Amato, who recently shifted $1.9 million in soft money from the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee to the Pataki war chest, wants to change that. But con-servatives outside New York should heed this early warning. George Pataki has failed to engage his own legislature or to attempt to educate New Yorkers about bold solutions. He certainly does not go as far as his putative hero, Barry Goldwater, in attacking Rockefeller Republicanism.

President Pataki? Ptooey.