New York Democrats will go to the polls today to cap the extraordinary rise of Eliot Spitzer and to give Senator Clinton an important boost in her quest for the party’s nomination for president in 2008. Mrs. Clinton’s victory is what one usually expects of incumbents — Senator Lieberman’s travails in Connecticut notwithstanding — but Eliot Spitzer’s glide onto his party’s gubernatorial ticket is something else entirely, and is even more exceptional for the ease with which people seem to expect him to cruise to victory in the general election. That general election is still two months off, a lifetime in politics, but the Democrat already has many New Yorkers talking about Governor Spitzer.

This newspaper is not endorsing in the Democratic primary, but we don’t gainsay Mr. Spitzer’s extraordinary accomplishments. They are all the more dramatic for the fact that he has not announced more than a handful of concrete policy proposals and most of those have been terrible. On the state’s oppressive state and local tax burden, Mr. Spitzer has proposed expanding the existing School Tax Relief, or STAR, program and “closing” corporate tax “loopholes.” Since STAR only shifts the school tax burden from local property taxes to state income taxes while creating perverse incentives for localities to spend more, the net effect of Mr. Spitzer’s plan would be to increase state and local taxes instead of cutting either.

While Mr. Spitzer’s reputation has been built on high-profile crusades against “corruption” on Wall Street, his prosecutions have been marred by embarrassing failures. Despite the large settlements he has wrung from Wall Street institutions, a jury handed him a humiliating defeat in one of the few cases to go to trial, the Theodore Sihpol matter. His office has just conceded yet another defeat on the most damaging allegations he had made against the American International Group’s Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. His pursuit of the New York Stock Exchange’s former chief executive, Richard Grasso, will not be wrapped up by Election Day. While pursing Mr. Grasso, he gave a pass to the high-profile Democrat who chaired the Exchange’s compensation committee.

This does not bode well for his claims that he will “clean up Albany” and put the state back in order, particularly when combined with the lustiness with which he has raked in money from the trial bar. Yet he has been saying many things about cleaning up Albany that the full spectrum of New Yorkers, including us, wants to hear. Listening to Mr. Spitzer’s stump speech, it can be easy to forget one is hearing a Democrat. His indictment of Albany’s political culture, his recognition that the budget is out of control, that state and local taxes are too high, sounds like a Republican oration.

Mr. Spitzer’s rise has no doubt been helped by the failures of the Republicans on Governor Pataki’s watch – and by the fact that many Republicans don’t seem to appreciate the nature of the problem in the state. Senator Bruno is actually criticizing his own party’s candidate, John Faso, for painting too pessimistic a view of the upstate economy. But New Yorkers know things aren’t going right in their state. Mr. Spitzer has managed to out-Republican some of the Republicans’ own leadership. He’s for the death penalty. He supports lifting the state’s cap on charter schools, though there are still questions about whether he’d require unionization of charter-school teachers. He opposed rolling 50,000 home healthcare workers onto the state payroll and is against the bills of attainder aimed at Wal-Mart. He purports to be opposed to tax increases, even though the technicalities of his STAR proposal belie that claim.

Once all this is sorted out today and we head into the general election, we’d like to think that Mr. Faso’s long record will come into focus. He is right on just about every issue, and has demonstrated over his career in Albany that he’s one of the few Republican lawmakers in New York to hew to principles. His greatest weakness this cycle has been his party, from Governor Pataki’s clumsy effort to crown William Weld as the Republican nominee to Mr. Bruno’s bizarre disputations on the condition of the upstate economy. After today the candidates will have the opportunity to put intra-party strife behind them and the rest of New Yorkers will look for the real differences in policy between the two parties led by two brilliant men.