Governor Spitzer is certainly getting an education in Albany. Even the newspapers that endorsed him to lead the state are calling the self-proclaimed steamroller things like Governor Softee. The New York Post, which endorsed him in florid terms, ran a picture of him as an ice cream cone. It reckons that his budget plan is a “spending riot” with “no real tax relief for anyone” and schools “bathed in cash” and future-year budgets “out of whack.” It says that he’s failed on schools and hospitals and most importantly failed to “fix Albany’s broken culture.” Its own hopes — come day 88 — the Post says are “fading.”

Our own reaction to Mr. Spitzer’s predicament is a bit different. He’s no John Faso, who really ran a campaign for governor on reformist, free-market, pro-growth economic principles. But Mr. Spitzer, once in office, did try to get a number of things done that we supported, including a significant increase in the cap on charter schools, accountability in the distribution of schools funding ordered in the wake of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and an attack on the public hospitals. It’s not every day that The New York Sun gets to root for a Democratic governor in a budget fight with a Republican Senate.

The smoke hasn’t entirely cleared. Our Jacob Gershman, filing from Albany on page one, reports on a deal that would expand the number of charter schools by 100. The terms governing the charters are not yet entirely clear, though there is some indication that the schools will need to stay below 250 students in their first two years in order to maintain one of the principal benefits of chartering, which is avoiding the grip of the teachers union. The governor and the Catholic schools — all New Yorkers really — lost on the experiment in tuition tax deductions that the governor wanted. A definitive picture on taxes and spending was still not available at deadline last night.

While the details are not all clear, it’s not too soon to say that the governor’s humiliation is a juncture in which the right move for Mr. Spitzer would be to retreat to whatever private study he does his best thinking in and reason out who his friends really are. Here is a man who must be one of the smartest politicians to appear on the scene in years, running for office in league with the teachers unions, the trial lawyers, and the health care unions. In some cases, he was slurping up political cash from them even while regulating them. What does one figure he was thinking when he laid plans to start his term by going against their interests?

The speaker of the Assembly and the leaders in the Senate may be all the negative things Mr. Spitzer said about them during his steamroller phase, but they danced, as the saying goes, with those that brought them. It strikes us that if Mr. Spitzer wants to make his mark by cutting spending, establishing educational accountability, expanding school choice, making a serious attack on Medicaid abuses, and curbing the growth rate in spending on the public hospitals, he would have done better to campaign on those issues and establish his bona fides with the reform-minded idealists who have been nursing those issues in the wilderness.

Now there are those who say that had he taken such a course — call it a wilderness campaign — he would have lost the election, maybe even the primary. But that’s the real test, after all, of whether a politician is prepared to stand on principle. Reagan — to cite the most principled great reformer of the last century — spent years in the wilderness standing by his principles before he finally got a mandate. He worked with the reform intelligentsia. He built his own movement. And he worked relentlessly to argue the substance of his ideas in the political, journalistic, religious, and cultural arenas. It would be a good strategy for the governor now that he’s had his first big lesson in Albany. We have little doubt that the governor would make new friends, ones he wouldn’t have to double cross to get the things he says he wants.