The big question after Governor Spitzer’s State of the State speech is not so much whether there is going to be “one New York,” to use the phrase the governor used as a marvelous mantra throughout his speech, but rather whether there is going to be one Spitzer. There is a Spitzer who is extremely attractive, one of the brightest and most impressive Democratic politicians seen in New York State in years, and not just personally, but also in terms of policy. We saw much of that Mr. Spitzer yesterday.

He started by recognizing our state’s soldiers who are fighting in the overseas theaters of the war on Islamic terror — and he managed to do it without any of the derisive comments about the war that are so often heard from other members of his party. The new governor vowed again yesterday that he would submit a budget January 31 that “will not raise taxes.” He told the legislature that it must “raise the charter school cap,” which was just terrific to hear.

Mr. Spitzer also suggested he was going to try to follow through on some of the clean government reforms on which he campaigned. He called for increased transparency in the member items that have been the source of some recent indictments of state lawmakers. All those are signs that evoke in us feelings of warmth for the kind of centrist Democrat we admire — and that Mr. Spitzer has often sought to portray himself as being. Were that the only Eliot Spitzer, why, New Yorkers wouldn’t have much of a need for a two-party system. If the new governor hewed to the centrist course, one gets the sense that he could go far, not only in Albany, where he has great ambitions, but nationally, where he also has great ambitions.

But when Mr. Spitzer talks at length in public, he often fails, as he did yesterday, to evince a commitment to the underlying principles. There was all too little talk about why New York needs a property tax cut, about why he’s not proposing new taxes, and about the structure of the tax cuts. There was not a word about incentives or about the role of taxes in the state’s population loss, one of the great scandals it faces. Or about how much of New York City’s financial business fled to London on his watch as attorney general.

His talk of the charter school cap — which the last governor couldn’t get the legislature to lift — was devoid of any reference to parental choice. When he was attorney general, his office published a far-sighted memo suggesting that school vouchers did not violate the state constitution. In going for a lift of the cap on school charters, he did the right thing, but he didn’t plant the flag very far down the field for those poor families who are scrambling for ways for their children to escape failing schools. Not a word on vouchers.

On the contrary, the new governor made it clear that for all the talk of independence, he’s buying into the class-size argument of the teachers unions. What use is all the talk of government ethics reform if the first thing he does when he walks into the legislative chamber is concede the ground to the teachers unions that have backed his party financially for so long? So, too, is the state “false claims act” that he proposes for health care a Trojan horse for another big Democratic funding source, the trial lawyers. And what is the use of all the campaign finance reform if it’s going to be replaced, as Mr. Spitzer proposed to do, with an almost socialistic system, a kind of welfare for politicians, where the state forces taxpayers to fund nearly any candidate who comes along?

So we’re glad to hear that there’s one New York. We thrilled to such talk when Rudolph Giuliani was using it in the campaign that landed him in City Hall. But we’re far from clear as to whether there is only one Eliot Spitzer — and, if there is only one, which one it is going to be. Watching the bizarre scene of the legislature and outgoing administration cheering the new governor as he talked about the failure of leadership lo these last years in Albany, New Yorkers could be left in little doubt that their new governor is going to have to stand on principles — and the right ones — or lose the fight he’s started.