The tenuous two-day “truce” that had obtained in Albany in the battle between Governor Spitzer, on the one hand, and the health care workers and hospital trustees, on the other hand, collapsed yesterday, and let us just say that New Yorkers are the better for it. The powerful Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union and their allies the Greater New York Hospital Association can go back to airing inflammatory television commercials depicting Mr. Spitzer as about to fire your local nurse and throw your sick grandmother out of her hospital bed. Mr. Spitzer can go back to denouncing the ads as misleading and explaining to New Yorkers that the reason their state and local taxes are the highest in the country is that our Medicaid costs are twice the national average. The union has a march scheduled for this afternoon in Manhattan on Third Avenue near the governor’s New York City office.

It will be illuminating to see which Democratic politicians show up. New Yorkers might as well call it a march for high taxes. Or the Campaign Against Trimming the Expenses of One of Albany’s Special Interests, since it is for a dictionary definition of a special interest that Mr. Spitzer is modestly trying to trim the expenses. No one wants to wreck New York’s hospitals, which are some of the nation’s finest and which every day do fine work in taking care of our sick and in doing research to prevent and cure deadly diseases. But this fight has so far been educational for ordinary New Yorkers, who, thanks primarily to the governor, are starting to get a sense of what is at stake.

Governor Pataki, faced with a similar advertising attack campaign, yielded. But as a Republican governor in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, he was in a weaker position than Mr. Spitzer is in. Mr. Spitzer has reminded New Yorkers of the deal that Mr. Pataki and the Legislature cut with 1199 to increase spending on union health care workers. It is well to remember that the Pataki-1199 deal was cut before the union released its onslaught of ads against Mr. Pataki. The point for Mr. Spitzer to mark is that a grand bargain with this particular public employee union is like a truce — temporary only and not driven by any long-term intersection of interests. If Mr. Spitzer yields on this one, any interest group he tries to take on in the future in his governorship or thereafter will come to see that he can be rolled by a few television commercials and a march in Manhattan. It’s getting to the point where the symbolism of this battle is as significant as the substance.