ALBANY – Governor Pataki’s political future is unlikely to be damaged by embarrassing tapes of private conversations featuring him and his wife that were published yesterday in the New York Post, political observers said.

The newspaper ran a transcript – whose authenticity officials did not deny – that included a crude conversation between a former official in the Pataki administration, Thomas Doherty, and Senator D’Amato about their efforts at rewarding a political ally with a job, as well as an excerpt in which Mr. Pataki’s wife, Libby, laments having to attend low-profile events without pay.

Mrs. Pataki also gripes on the edited, nine-year-old tape that then-Mayor Giuliani’s second wife, Donna, is attracting more notice from the press than she is.

“I spent seven hours running from here to there, and there was not one sentence,” Mrs. Pataki said in the tape. “There were pictures of Donna Giuliani all over the papers. It’s not that I’m not photogenic. … I said, ‘George, I’m running around like an idiot. I’d rather be doing major, big events and not be doing all this bull-crap.'”

The tapes, which the Post said were sent anonymously to its Albany bureau, were labeled “Pandora’s Box.” The recording of a private telephone conversation by a third party without consent is against the law in New York. A spokesman for Mr. Pataki raised the possibility that printing private phone calls is also illegal.

“Taping anyone’s private conversations without proper consent is illegal,” the spokesman for the governor, David Catalfamo, said. “Printing those conversations – when they serve no public interest – is unethical and potentially illegal.”

Mr. Catalfamo said that the governor has asked the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to look into the tapes.

Political observers said the tapes do not appear to contain anything that would do lasting damage to Mr. Pataki, who is eyeing a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

“It’s not the best day in the media business for the Patakis,” the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, Lee Miringoff, said. “But I don’t think it has long-term political damage beyond the fact that it suggests that they need to play up to speed if they want to go into the national scene.”

Mr. Miringoff said Mr. Pataki’s name recognition is too low among national voters – he put it in the single digits – at this point for the Post story to have broad impact.

“I think Mr. Pataki’s image is not formed for a national office at this point,” the Marist analyst said. “I suspect a few good one-liners could deflect this if it were ever brought up.”

Still, a number of Internet and television outlets, including the Drudge Report Web site and MSNBC, posted the tapes or were arranging to discuss them – a sign the story could help Mr. Pataki’s visibility nationally, if not in the way the governor would like.

A former executive director of the Republican State Committee, Brendan Quinn, said the tapes make Mrs. Pataki look worse than her husband, whose published comments were limited to arrangements for a funeral.

“I think the worst part of what is in the paper is that Ms. Pataki looks very mean-spirited and petty,” Mr. Quinn said.