ALBANY – With his economic record under attack, Governor Pataki is accusing his attorney general of insulting the state’s residents by saying that upstate New York looks like Appalachia.

When Eliot Spitzer made the comparison in a speech last week, he won chuckles from his Upper West Side audience. But the Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s comments have won him the enmity of the governor and sharp words from his Republican opponents.

Mr. Spitzer’s harsh assessment of the economic condition of upstate, conjuring for some images of toothless, grinning, banjo-slapping New Yorkers, appears to have touched a nerve with the governor.

A recovering Mr. Pataki, in his first press conference at the Capitol since leaving the hospital following an extended stay, yesterday called Mr. Spitzer’s remarks “unfortunate and certainly insulting” as he sought to defend not only the honor of rural New Yorkers but more important his own legacy as the state’s leader since 1995.

Mr. Spitzer isn’t the first politician to cast the more benighted areas of the Empire State in an uncomfortable light, but his Appalachia comparison has developed into a campaign issue in the governor’s race and has prompted debate about Mr. Pataki’s economic record.

Mr. Spitzer’s Republican opponents, who generally have tiptoed around questions regarding the results of Mr.Pataki’s economic policies, pounced on Mr. Spitzer’s remarks, saying they are proof of the attorney general’s Manhattan-bred elitism and what they describe as his obliviousness to the lives of New Yorkers outside the big city and suburbs.

“Mr. Spitzer must know that his ‘Appalachia’ comment is at least borderline insulting, which may be why he launched it from a safe distance: a podium on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,” a Republican candidate and former governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, said in a statement yesterday. Another candidate, Randy Daniels, a former secretary of state in the Pataki administration, called Mr. Spitzer’s comments “wrong” and “troubling.”

Rising to his own defense, Mr. Pataki said in a pointed manner, “Appalachia doesn’t have Empire Zones,” referring to a program started by his administration several years ago that gives business tax breaks to a scattering of economically depressed communities across the state.

The attorney general made the remarks 10 days ago in a campaign speech at a Manhattan synagogue. “If you drive from Schenectady to Niagara Falls,” he reportedly said,”you’ll see an economy that is devastated. It looks like Appalachia. This is not the New York we dream of.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Spitzer said yesterday the attorney general stands by his comments.

Some political observers said Mr. Spitzer’s description of economic conditions in the state had echoes of Edward Koch’s infamous Playboy magazine interview from 1982, when the former mayor of New York City ridiculed rural life. “When you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears, Roebuck suit? This rural America thing – I’m telling you, it’s a joke.” In the same interview, he referred to Albany as “small town life at its worst.” Under pressure, Mr. Koch quickly apologized, but his comments left their mark, becoming a liability in his failed gubernatorial bid against Mario Cuomo.

Mr. Cuomo two years later found himself in hot water with New Yorkers when the people of Essex County in northern New York didn’t appreciate the lofty rhetoric of his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Unlike any other party, we embrace men and women of every color, every creed, every orientation, every economic class. In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts of both ends of our nation,” he said.

The difference this time around is that not everyone appears to be offended. Indeed, some are praising Mr. Spitzer for his bluntness. An editorial published in the Watertown Times said, “One can assume he did not intend to insult the upstate region. But he is challenging New York to do better.”

The Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, who is running for re-election this year, yesterday not only refused to criticize the attorney general but sided with him: “I can understand what he’s saying. We have pockets in towns and villages, and areas where the people are very disadvantaged.”

A spokesman for the Business Council of New York State, Matthew Maguire, said Mr. Spitzer wasn’t talking about “hicks in gingham dresses” but “economic problems.” For example, job growth in upstate New York between 1990 and 2005 was 4.2%, he said, compared with the national average of 21.9% during the same time interval. The population in upstate New York is dropping, while the once-powerful industrial cities like Buffalo continue to decline.

“Nobody is thrilled to have a huge swath of this state compared to a symbol of economic weakness,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it either unfair or inappropriate.” Businesses, he said, have to contend with high energy and workers’ compensation costs and the nation’s highest combined state and local taxes.

As for the good people of Appalachia,the mountainous area that extends from Alabama to Maine, they, like the governor of New York, seemed to have taken offense to Mr. Spitzer’s remarks – in reverse.The executive director of the Heart of Appalachia Tourism Authority in Virginia, Geneva O’Quinn, said the people in her region might not want to be associated with the most blighted parts of New York.

Mr. Spitzer’s “got a standing invitation to see my area of Appalachia,” she told The New York Sun, correctly pronouncing it appa-latcha. “Everybody has their economic problems. It would be better all around if somebody didn’t use the connotation to point to a blot he may have in his own area.”