ALBANY — The next test for Governor Spitzer will be in four weeks, when he has to deliver a budget that balances his promise not to raise taxes with the litany of priorities he unveiled yesterday in his first State of the State address.

“The budget I will submit on January 31st will not raise taxes,” Mr. Spitzer declared from the dais of the ornate Assembly chambers that overflowed with lawmakers, judges, city and civic leaders, executive staff members, and the heads of the most powerful interest groups in Albany.

Mr. Spitzer was as adamant about what would be included in the budget: a $1.5 billion bill to give homeowners bigger exemptions on their property taxes; a $2 billion bond act to pay for stem cell research; enough funding for public schools to end the debate over the state’s obligation to New York City’s public education system; a proposal to extend health insurance to hundreds of thousands of uninsured children; a plan to give all New Yorkers access to “affordable” high-speed broadband, and even funding to battle climate change.

On top of that, the governor promised to end the “culture of spending” in Albany by dramatically reducing the growth rate of the budget, which soared above inflation during the later Pataki years. While paying for his initiatives, Mr. Spitzer must also close a budget gap that is estimated at $2.4 billion for the 2007-08 fiscal year. “The question that will be answered at the end of the month is how he makes it all fit into the budget,” the director of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State, E.J. McMahon, said.

“How do you not raise taxes and implement the major proposals?” Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the Democratic county leader of Brooklyn and chairman of the Assembly’s housing committee, said. He said Mr. Spitzer will “be evaluated on which initiatives are actually passed.”

Mr. Spitzer is betting that he can push through his agenda — his budget and other policy proposals — by employing a strategy of consensus combined with targeted cuts, particularly in the area of health care, which is consuming an increasingly larger share of the budget.

Over and over again, Mr. Spitzer in his speech stressed a theme of compromise, saying New Yorkers were “bound together by our collective need for change.”

Balancing the interests of municipalities and unions, Mr. Spitzer supports scaling back a costly construction mandate called the Wicks Law without hurting the subcontractors who benefit from the law. On the issue of education, he is coupling a proposal to expand charter schools with extra “transitional aid” to school districts, such as Buffalo, that face stiffer competition from charter schools for public dollars. The governor is indicating that he plans to add billions of dollars to the budget to resolve legal questions surrounding its support for New York City schools. But he added that new aid would be “based upon the principle that with any new investment must come new accountability.”

Mr. Spitzer used the word “accountability” seven times in his speech.

Mr. Spitzer’s middle-of-the-road approach put him in various political camps at different parts in his speech. When he talked about campaign finance reform, Mr. Spitzer sounded more like a traditional Democrat, pushing for a “reform effort” with the long-term goal of full public financing of campaigns. Minutes later, Mr. Spitzer came off as a budget hawk, proposing to eliminate unneeded public authorities and reducing the number of taxing jurisdictions in the state.

The approach earned Mr. Spitzer praise from both sides of the political aisle and from opposing interest groups — an unusual feat in Albany.

Mayor Bloomberg said Mr. Spitzer had delivered a “great speech,” praising the governor for “demanding good government and making sure you fund the programs that work and terminate the programs that don’t.” Some in the audience noted that the State of the State was unusual for the small amount of attention it devoted specifically to New York City.

“He’s saying all the right things,” the Republican leader of the Senate, Joseph Bruno, said. The Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, hailed Mr. Spitzer as a consensus-builder who brought leadership “that has been lacking in the past.”

The speech won praise from charter school advocates, who cheered Mr. Spitzer’s support for raising the cap on the schools, and from the head of the city’s teachers union. “He talked specifically about reforms — smaller class sizes and pre-K — that I have advocated for as long as I can remember,” the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, said.

“It wasn’t a political speech,” the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, said. “I don’t think it pandered to any constituency.”

Mr. Spitzer’s speech also failed to mention several hot-button issues in the state. He avoided talking about the death penalty, gay marriage, terms limits, and the fate of the Indian Point in Westchester County. The governor also included few budget numbers in his speech.

While the praise was in unison, several potential sources of tension lie ahead. Mr. Spitzer’s plans to establish public campaign financing, merit selection for state Supreme Court justices, nonpartisan redistricting, and a False Claims Act, allowing Medicaid fraud whistle-blowers to collect money, are likely to run into opposition from lawmakers.

Speaking to reporters, Mr. Bruno, whose political future hinges on the outcome of a federal investigation into his outside business interests, said he could not recall anything he disagreed with in the governor’s speech. He later said, however, that he opposes banning private money from campaigns. “We won’t support disenfranchising the voters of this state in their ability to be supportive of the people they want to support for public office,” he said.

Another looming conflict concerns charter schools. The UFT said it would back an expansion of the schools if Mr. Spitzer agrees to changes to the law governing charter schools, including replacing secret ballot union elections with an open card check process. “We’ve been open to looking at the whole charter school law…. provided that other parts of the law are changed,” Ms. Weingarten said. She said Mr. Spitzer was open to those changes.