The feature to mark about the vetoes Governor Pataki is preparing to cast on the budget is how little difference they will make. If lawmakers choose to override him for the second year in a row, the state will, according to Mr. Pataki’s calculations, spend $101.6 billion this year. If not, it will spend $101.3 billion. The potential savings amounts to about one-quarter of 1%, which might be characterized as rounding error. Either way, a budget that already weighs far too heavily on the state’s economy will grow at more than twice the rate of inflation.

The situation leads to the conclusion that Mr. Pataki – who has been in his best moments a good friend to the taxpayer – is relinquishing his command of New York State. This is partly because a governor cannot veto inaction. Mr. Pataki proposed, for example, to hold the growth of New York’s $42 billion Medicaid health plan for the poor – which is already by far the costliest of any state’s – to a mere $600 million. That would have entailed trimming benefits, tightening eligibility rules, and holding the line on payments to providers.

The Democrat-led Assembly and the Republican-led Senate, who are in the thrall of health-care unions, flatly rejected nearly all of those ideas, adding hundreds of millions to the expense side of the ledger that are out of the reach of Mr. Pataki’s veto knife. Yet Mr. Pataki protests a bit too much when he claims to have done everything within his power to control spending. The governor spent much of the past five years conspiring with the health-care unions to expand Medicaid, adding benefits and making promises that drive much of the current growth.

Consider, too, that Mr. Pataki committed in advance not to veto an increase in state aid to school districts of 5%, which will cost the state more than $500 million this fiscal year. He also spared a $200 million slush fund that senators and assemblymen plan to divvy up for pet projects in their districts. The less-than-compelling rationale for this decision was that lawmakers had tied this money to another $250 million in economic development money that Mr. Pataki considers important.

There is also the governor’s failure to veto a $170 million payment to the city of New York, the first installment of a now infamous plan to refinance bonds left over from the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. The city is presently just four years and $2 billion away from paying off those debts. A scheme cooked up by the Legislature last year would shift the burden to the state, run up to price tag to $5.1 billion, and delay the closing of a costly chapter in New York history for another three decades.

Mr. Pataki notes in his defense that he fought the refinancing in court – admirably, by our lights – and lost. But that does not prevent him from vetoing an appropriation he abhors. Forcing an override would at least delay this fiscal abomination, and it just might discomfit the Legislature and Mayor Bloomberg enough to precipitate a rethinking. By failing to exercise the veto on this head, the governor becomes complicit in a matter he had heretofore been opposing on principle.

Evidently, Mr. Pataki feels he must calibrate his vetoes to avoid provoking the Legislature into overriding him wholesale as it did last year. His straitened circumstance owes in large part to the Democrats’ veto-proof majority in the Assembly and the Senate Republicans’ willingness to humble a governor of their own party. One can’t help but think, however, that Mr. Pataki sacrificed a good deal of his puissance in the halfhearted way he fought last year’s budget battle.

He started out strong, vetoing all of the Legislature’s tax hikes and spending increases, buying TV time to whip up public support, threatening political retribution against lawmakers who defied him, and hinting at lawsuits and executive orders that would prevent much of the budget from going into effect. In the end, however, the publicity campaign fizzled, he took no obvious political revenge, and his only court action targeted the refinancing plan for New York City – which, though justifiable, caused no pain for the legislators who were his real enemies in the affair.

Mr. Pataki formalized his defeat by presenting a budget in January that did not insist on repealing the tax hikes and other measures he had properly opposed a few months before. The consequences of his mistakes become obvious now. A governor who began his administration as a revolutionary – slashing taxes, reducing red tape, cracking down on crime, shrinking government – must now content himself with tinkering around the edges of a $101.6 billion budget and hoping the legislature doesn’t throw the vetoes back in his face.