The flap over the state Democratic Party chairman’s assertion on Wednesday that cutting taxes isn’t a top priority is the latest proof that taxes and spending will be dominant issues in this year’s race to replace Governor Pataki.

Although the front-runner, Eliot Spitzer, is riding a seemingly endless wave of stellar opinion poll numbers, the Democrat faces increasing pressure to take a position on fiscal issues.

His recent hints at moving toward the fiscal right place him at odds with parts of the Democratic establishment. At the same time, the focus on taxes and spending is drawing him away from his core campaign theme that stresses the general reform of state government. Mr. Spitzer’s campaign has recently been busy defending a plan for cutting property taxes – and insisting that spending proposals won’t blow a hole in the budget.

Whether the more narrowing focus on fiscal matters will help or hurt Mr. Spitzer is unknown. It’s clear, however, that his rivals are aggressively trying to frame the debate, and at this early stage, are succeeding.

Mr. Spitzer’s Republican rival, John Faso, appears to be following the game plan of Governor Pataki’s 1994 race against Mario Cuomo, who was seeking a fourth term as leader of the state. When he wasn’t calling for a death penalty, Mr. Pataki repeatedly assailed Mr. Cuomo for adopting a “politics of higher taxes” and vowed to make the state more fiscally responsible.

The Faso campaign was quick to exploit a remark the Democratic chairman, Herman “Denny” Farrell, Jr., made on Wednesday – when he said taxes and spending weren’t among the party’s top three priorities. Mr. Spitzer publicly disassociated himself from the comments, and Mr. Farrell later retracted them by saying he “misspoke.” An aide to Mr. Faso said the remark was evidence that Mr. Spitzer and the Democrats are intent on raising taxes.

The mileage to be gained from such attacks on the Spitzer campaign remains to be seen. The political dynamic is different from 1994 when Mr. Cuomo’s long fiscal record provided Mr. Pataki with all the ammunition he needed. This time around, all candidates are blank slates to a certain extent. And if Republicans are accusing Democrats of secretly planning to raise taxes, Democrats can point to the record of the party that has held the governor’s mansion for the last 12 years.

After three terms of Mr. Pataki, New York’s total local and state taxes are still the highest in the nation and the annual state spending has increased by about $50 billion, to $112.3 billion.

Mr. Farrell seemed to make that argument at his press conference on Wednesday. Mr. Pataki, he said, “cut taxes, and we ended up now having the higher rate. All we did was shift the responsibility of taxing from the state to the localities, and we’ve got to undo that. We tried very hard to fight him.”

On the campaign trail and at press events, Mr. Faso has crystallized his platform into a catchy sentence: “Eliot Spitzer will raise your taxes.” He pauses for extra emphasis, and then says, “And then he’ll raise them again.”

The line is a familiar one in New York and national politics. Randy Daniels, a former New York secretary of state, used it to attack Mr. Spitzer before he dropped out of the race, and Ronald Reagan deftly deployed the slogan against Walter Mondale during the 1984 campaign.

Mr. Spitzer and his aides are adamant that the candidate is against raising taxes. In his speech at last week’s Democratic convention in Buffalo, after he accepted his party’s designation, Mr. Spitzer said, “We will provide relief, we will restore fairness, and we will bring transparency and accountability back to the tax system of New York.”

Mr. Spitzer’s Democratic challenger, Thomas Suozzi, joins Mr. Faso in saying that Mr. Spitzer is trying to have it both ways: They say he’s proposing billions of dollars in new capital and budget spending – including replacing the 50-year-old Tappan Zee Bridge spanning the Hudson River, adding 1.4 million people to Medicaid rolls, and pouring more money into New York City public schools in compliance with a court order – without saying how the state will pay for it.

“His Albany math doesn’t add up,” said Dan Gerstein, a consultant to the Suozzi campaign. “Either he’s misleading them about all the promises he’s making…or he’s misleading them when he says he’s going to cut property taxes. It’s impossible to do both.”

The Suozzi campaign says Mr. Spitzer’s plans would add $32 billion to the state budget. The Spitzer campaign says the actual figure is much lower and says the projects that the attorney general is proposing would meet vital state needs. Mr. Spitzer seems to be winning the battle, with a 50-point lead in the polls.

The Faso campaign said the problem with Mr. Spitzer’s proposals is less about the cost than with the way the money is spent. A spokeswoman for Mr. Faso, Susan Del Percio, said Mr. Spitzer would put prevailing-wage restrictions on the bidding process for the construction of a bridge replacement that would drive up costs. Mr. Spitzer says replacing the bridge would cost $5 billion in capital spending.

“The spending that’s being proposed is limited,” said a spokeswoman for the Spitzer campaign, Christine Anderson. She said the projects fall into a “context of a fiscally conservative plan.” While Mr. Spitzer’s opponents have called on him to pledge not to raise taxes, Ms. Anderson said he won’t take the bait. Aides are keenly aware of politicians who made pledges in the past not to raise tax only to see such promises backfire when they confront the realities of governing.