The New York Sun urges a vote next Tuesday on the Republican line topped by George Pataki for governor, Mary O. Donohue for lieutenant governor, and John Faso for comptroller. While we have plenty of doubts about the way the governor has recently been conducting his office and his campaign, we’re of the opinion that the Republican Party is the best institution for pressing the case of reform in New York. We’re particularly enthusiastic about John Faso, who has emerged as the closest thing in the race to a supplyside politician in the mold that produced the boom that crested in the 1990s. We don’t mind saying that we’d like to see Judge Irizarry retire Attorney General Spitzer, who is using his law enforcement powers in a quest for higher office.

H. Carl McCall, in our opinion, deserved a lot better than he has received in the past weeks from his fellow Democrats, who have all but abandoned him in an uphill fight. We confess we thought about endorsing him after we heard on the radio an advertisement attacking him for voting shares the state pension fund holds in favor of the pharmaceutical companies, that is, in favor of profits and against the people. The advertisement turned out to be for Mr. Pataki. One had to pinch oneself to remember which party was headed by which candidate. The governor’s big payouts to Local 1199 of the service employees and to the teachers, coming as they did in the midst of a political courtship, are an abuse of taxpayers’ trust, but it’s hard to imagine the Democrats taking a tougher line on these kinds of spending questions.

Thos. Golisano we listened to with some enthusiasm, particularly with his call for zero-based budgeting and his reserve on taxes. He has enormous achievements. But the more we listened to him the less we had the sense that he had a vision we shared on matters of the economy. A Reaganite he is not. He talked with a good bit of animation about the need for campaign finance reform, but it got to be almost offensive, coming from a man who has just spent a record amount on a gubernatorial race and all of it his own money. If he can do that, why shouldn’t the rest of the citizens of the Empire State be permitted to spend their own money on the candidates they back — and seek to multiply their impact by spending through the labor unions they belong to, the companies they own, or the interest groups they have assembled. We are also concerned that a vote on the Independence line could end up empowering downstate members of the party, notably Lenora Fulani. Though Mr. Golisano is an opponent of hers within the party, a second-place finish would put the Independence Party in a position to control the state’s various Boards of Election, which control the machinery of voting and have served as powerful sources of electoral influence and patronage.

Governor Pataki’s success in putting together a coalition of backers as disparate as the the service employees and the teachers, on the one hand, and the various Republican factions on the other, this is no mean feat in a time of healing at both a national and local level. But by our lights it has come at a high cost in the coin of public policy and has robbed many of us of the hope that he might yet stand for sound principles of political economy. When we think of the future, we keep an eye out for candidates like Mr. Faso, who stands a chance down the road of serving as a true conservative, Republican alternative for New York State. Mr. Faso, who spent 16 years in the Republican minority of the State Assembly, and left the position of minority leader to run for comptroller, has long experience in budget matters and a long record as a champion of fiscal conservatism. Perhaps the brightest mark on his record is his role in the crafting of Mr. Pataki’s 1995 budget, the governor’s first, as the head of his transition team, which was a model of the Good Pataki who stood as a tax cutter and who restrained spending. And it is yet conceivable that with the election behind them, he and Mr. Pataki can yet hammer out a strategy that eschews austerity and focuses on incentives for the kind of growth that will be hospitable to private sector expansion and a healthy government.