As Governor Pataki prepares to announce on Saturday his campaign for a third term, a bit of grumbling is starting to be heard about whether he really intends to stick around Albany for a full four years. The Washington end of this we first heard from our columnist, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who, in this week’s edition of “The Bully Pulpit,” recounts the skinny he’s been hearing about the governor angling for a job in the Bush administration. Mr. Tyrrell relates these rumors in his inimitable and laconic fashion but, as always, there’s a serious point.

What sticks with us is the thought that New York is at a juncture where the solution to its problems lies less with the federal government than with the institutions at the state and local levels. Certainly there are those who will say that September 11 changed all that, precipitating the kind of crisis that can be addressed only with federal help. Our own concern is less that the federal help might falter than that it will obscure the fact that Mr. Pataki’s early promises of a government of principle have been largely squandered in an eight-year string of compromises.

An accounting of this by our Harry Siegel also appears in the adjacent columns, and it’s a dismaying picture. There is the apparent indifference to the fact that an opportunity to move on rent control is again on the horizon, the collusion with the teachers union, the dealings with the hospital workers. We are always alert to the problem of the perfect driving out the good. Mr. Pataki has certainly been better than one can imagine the elder Mr. Cuomo would have been. But the fact is that Mr. Pataki has been developing a record of late that has left many who originally supported him mightily dismayed.

It is not the sort of moment when the logical thing for Mr. Pataki to do is to think of Washington. Particularly at a time when President Bush himself seems to be swaying between the camp that wants him to act on principle and the camp that wants him to make the kinds of compromises Mr. Pataki has been making. The governor was famously and justifiably insulted when one of his Democratic challengers, Andrew Cuomo, questioned his performance after September 11. Mr. Cuomo make the mistake of citing the very occasion when Mr. Pataki seemed to rediscover his spine. But the determination the governor showed in managing a crisis has been lacking in his approach to the more mundane tasks involved in governing the state. The best thing he could do when he announces tomorrow is answer unequivocally the question of whether he will devote a full third term in Albany to securing the principles on which he launched his political career.