Governor Pataki’s prime-time speech to the Republican National Convention tonight will feel like an audition.

New York’s 53rd governor won’t merely be introducing President Bush as the party nominee. He’ll also be making the highest-profile TV appearance of his life, giving all of America the chance to size him up as a potential Cabinet secretary, or challenger for Senator Clinton in 2006, or – just maybe – contender for the White House in 2008.

Assuming, that is, the speculation about his ambitions for higher office are true.

For the record, Mr. Pataki says he is too focused on re-electing Mr. Bush and governing New York State to ponder his own political future right now. But one thing is clear from his career so far: He’s good at picking the fights he can win.

George Elmer Pataki has run twice for mayor of his hometown of Peekskill, four times for the state Assembly, once for state Senate, three times for governor – and never lost a race. He even won an election for class president in high school, despite being, as he recalled in his 1998 autobiography, a “geeky kid” from the wrong side of the tracks.

To this day, he lacks the operatic persona of other nationally famous New York politicians, such as Governors Rockefeller and Cuomo or Mayors Koch and Giuliani.

He owes his unbeaten streak not to charisma, but to chutzpah, luck, and – above all -sharp political judgment.

“In my experience, George Pataki is always two or three steps ahead of everybody else,” said a former Assembly minority leader, John Faso.

Like others who have worked with the governor, Mr. Faso describes Mr. Pataki as one of the smartest people he knows.

As a member of the transition team in 1995, Mr. Faso recalls briefing the newly elected governor on a complex budget issue, and presenting him with a binder of background material, just before Mr. Pataki was to meet with victims of a shooting rampage at a state university.

“I can remember thinking at the time, ‘Gee, he’s not really paying a whole lot of attention to what I’m telling him,'” Mr. Faso said. “And two days later, I met with him again, and he knew the binder cold. He knew all the nuance that was contained in there. He was a very quick study.”

“He is laser like in cutting through the mush,” said a former adviser to the governor, Robert Bellafiore. “He would look at things and say, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. You can’t tell me we can’t fix it.’ That’s what I’ve always liked.”

Though Mr. Pataki is not considered a compelling public speaker, Mr. Faso said his intelligence and geniality make him more persuasive in private.

“I was just with somebody, a very successful businessman in the state, who was remarking if George Pataki could meet the whole country in small groups, there’s no doubt he could be elected president,” Mr. Faso said.

Mr. Pataki first made a national name for himself by displacing Mr. Cuomo, a liberal icon, and pugnaciously following through on his campaign agenda of cutting taxes, reducing state spending, cracking down on crime, trimming welfare rolls, and easing regulations on business.

Later he blurred his image by sponsoring gun control laws, supporting gay rights, embracing environmentalist causes, and cutting expensive deals with the leader of New York’s largest union for health-care workers, Dennis Rivera of SEIU Local 1199. Thanks to the Wall Street boom, he was able to continue cutting taxes while also allowing spending to grow at Cuomo-esque rates.

When conservatives grumbled, the mantra of his aides became “five to three,” a reference to the fact that there are five registered Democrats in New York for every three Republicans.

His leftward trek confounded the Democrats who wanted to remove him, but also disenchanted many of those who had backed him early on.

“Quite frankly he’s not somebody you would call a leader,” said a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon. “He’s someone who lays in the weeds waiting to figure out which parade to jump in front of. … He is a patriot. He is for mom and apple pie. But he keeps a great personal distance from anything controversial.”

Critics point out that some of Mr. Pataki’s early accomplishments have eroded. State government once again faces chronic, multibillion-dollar deficits. Thanks to the temporary tax hikes enacted by the Legislature last year, higher-income families are paying at almost the same rate they did before Mr. Pataki took office. And the death penalty law he signed with much fanfare in 1995 has yet to result in an execution, and it was recently ruled invalid by the state’s highest court.

“The aura of lame duck is pretty overpowering,” said Mr. McMahon said. “George Pataki’s been living off of his first-term record for a long time now, and it’s beginning to grow mold.”

Mr. Pataki’s defenders, however, blame the setbacks on terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a nationwide recession, and a Legislature with a will of its own. They point out that crime rates are still way down, welfare rolls are a third of what they were in 1995, and the state is having more success attracting business development.

“People forget what this place was like,” Mr. Bellafiore said. “People forget in the late ’80s and early ’90s how bad things were – economically, socially, in terms of public safety – and all that’s turned around.”

Born June 24, 1945, Mr. Pataki grew up on a 12-acre farm operated by his grandparents, who had emigrated from Hungary 40 years earlier. His father was a postman and volunteer firefighter. His mother’s parents came from Ireland and Italy.

He made it to Yale on a scholarship, following his older brother, and then went on to law school at Columbia. He worked for a few years at the Manhattan firm of Dewey Ballantine before taking his first job in Albany – on the staff of a Senate judiciary task force – and moving back to Peekskill. He married Elizabeth “Libby” Rowland, started a family, served two terms as mayor of the small, working-class town, and moved on to the Assembly.

Tall, intelligent, and ambitious, Mr. Pataki stood out from the beginning. But he was a long way from the top of the Albany food chain.

The legislative director of the Business Council of New York State, Elliott Shaw, recalls going to a fund-raiser for the freshman assemblyman in 1985, and finding only five or six people in the room.

“Every time the door at the top of stairway opened, everyone looked up hoping it was somebody coming to George Pataki’s fund-raiser,” Mr. Shaw said. “But they were people using the restaurant upstairs.”

Despite his obscurity, Mr. Pataki foresaw that a Republican with the right credentials – an ethnic, pro-choice suburbanite who favored the death penalty and tax cuts – could de feat Governor Cuomo. As someone who fit the profile, Mr. Pataki began to covet the job for himself. But he was cautious enough to pass up the nomination when it was first offered to him by party officials in 1990.

Instead, Mr. Pataki decided it was time to graduate to the Senate. The incumbent senator in his district, Mary Goodhue, was a Republican for whom he had formerly worked. Rather than wait for her to retire, he challenged her to a primary in 1992 and won.

Having campaigned for the Senate on a platform of reducing state spending and cutting taxes, he faced a moment of truth early in his term. It had been easy for him to vote against budget bills as a member of the minority party in the Assembly. Now he was expected to support whatever compromise the Senate majority leader, Ralph Marino, agreed to in negotiations with the governor and the Assembly speaker.

In closed-door caucus meetings, Marino and his fellow Republicans leaned on the freshman senator to vote in favor of the $64 billion budget, which postponed tax cuts that had been scheduled years earlier. Mr. Pataki refused, and became the only member of the majority to vote no. As it turned out, he was not only keeping a campaign promise; he was positioning himself to campaign as a consistent opponent of Mr. Cuomo’s fiscal policies.

“He held his ground,” said one early Pataki supporter, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good – a profile in courage.’ I didn’t know at the time he was thinking of running for governor. It was a calculated move.”

The calculation, if it was one, almost backfired. Marino used all of his clout to prevent the mutinous senator from receiving the nomination for governor. Ultimately, however, Mr. Pataki won the support of Senator D’Amato and other party officials, who overruled Marino’s objections.

Mr. Pataki went on to defeat Mr. Cuomo narrowly, by a vote of 2.54 million to 2.36 million, and Marino, who died in 2002, was ousted as majority leader shortly after the election.

Not all of his political judgments have been spot on, of course. His choice for lieutenant governor was a health policy analyst from the Manhattan Institute, Elizabeth McCaughey, who had no political experience. She refused to stay in the governor’s shadow, and caused a stir when she remained standing throughout his entire “State of the State” speech in 1996. After Mr. Pataki dropped her from the ticket in 1998 in favor of the more pliant Mary Donohue, Ms. McCaughey made an abortive attempt to run against him as a Democrat.

If Mr. Pataki’s public image remains vague after a decade as governor, it is partly a result of his political style. His administration tightly controls its message, and he and his aides stick closely to a few talking points on any given issue. They avoid debating controversial topics in public, or telegraphing their positions in advance, preferring to hash things out in private negotiations.

This stealthy style has produced some notable victories. After the 1998 elections, when members of the Legislature were clamoring for their first salary increase in a decade, Mr. Pataki declared that he would not go along with a raise “standing alone.” He quietly let it be known that he was willing to trade, and a few weeks later the Legislature, in return for 38% more pay, passed a law authorizing charter schools in New York state for the first time.

Mr. Pataki sprung another surprise in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when he negotiated secretly a plan with Mr. Rivera of 1199 that dramatically increased cigarette taxes and subsidizes the pay and benefits of health-care workers with billions of dollars in state funds. This later resulted in an election-year endorsement for Mr. Pataki from the normally left-leaning union.

When word of the plan first leaked out, Mr. Pataki refused to discuss its details, saying he didn’t want to give fodder to potential opponents. Later, after the measure had been hastily passed and signed into law, Mr. Pataki’s only comment was, “We’re making the best health-care system in the world even better.”

This penchant for secrecy draws criticism from government watchdogs.

“How can the public be informed if no one in government tells them anything?” said the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, Blair Horner. “In terms of public accountability, that approach is terrible. … In terms of a political tactic it’s quite successful. It’s hard to be attacked for a position if you never take one.”

Mr. Pataki has not pulled off any similar coups recently, and doesn’t seem to have tried. The report from his Commission on Education Reform earlier this year, for example, did not make the case for experimenting with tuition vouchers for public school parents – an item high on the conservative agenda. Given the deep-seated opposition from teachers’ unions, he evidently determined it would be futile to push the issue.

“This is not someone who is willing to fail trying greatly,” Mr. McMahon said. “The funny thing is he admires Teddy Roosevelt, the inventor of the phrase ‘bully pulpit,’ and he never uses the bully pulpit. … He doesn’t use his position to exhort or explain.”

Although he won re-election by wide margins in 1998 and 2002, Mr. Pataki’s influence at the state Capitol now seems to be at low ebb. Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats worked together last year to override all 120 of his budget vetoes, and might do so again this year.

Yet those budget fights may have improved his standing with the national GOP by re-establishing his bona fides as a fiscal conservative. He has further ingratiated himself with the party by raising $9.5 million for President Bush and voicing full-throated support for the war in Iraq. He also has campaigned for the president in states that are important for any nationwide campaign, such as Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, and California.

Some experts are dubious that a Republican from the Northeast who favors abortion rights, gun control, and gay rights could make it onto a Republican presidential ticket these days.

“The logic of Republican politics does not suggest building a coalition that includes New York,” said a political science professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Gerald Benjamin.

But Mr. Faso said it’s too soon to count out the governor, who has never lost an election.

“He could definitely be a viable candidate,” Mr. Faso said. “The question of whether, in the rarified air of presidential politics, you make it – is almost as much a product of planning as it is of serendipity.”