After that unfortunate episode involving a nasty message left on the voicemail of Eliot Spitzer’s octogenarian father, Senate Republicans no longer pay Roger Stone for advice.

Mr. Stone used to collect $20,000 a month from Republicans before they terminated his contract last year amid allegations that he threatened Bernard Spitzer. Over the weekend though, from his home in Miami Beach and between puffs on a Cuban cigar, the political operative was feeling generous enough to offer Joseph Bruno and his besieged colleagues a few pointers, this time free of charge.

As the “Weekly Standard” noted in a recent cover-story profile of him, Mr. Stone goes by the motto: “Above all, attack, attack, attack — never defend.”

Mr. Bruno, the boss of a fading majority, is losing to Mr. Spitzer because attack, attack, attack has become whine, whine, whine, Mr. Stone told me.

The 78-year-old Senate leader “has no strategy other than whining about Troopergate,” he said, referring to the protracted saga over the Spitzer administration’s botched attempt to nail Mr. Bruno on charges that he abused his state-subsidized transportation privileges on fund-raising trips to New York City.

Don’t get him wrong: Mr. Stone, or “political animal” as the Weekly Standard called him, isn’t going soft on Eliot. He says he’s convinced that the governor and his senior aides “acted egregiously” and probably perpetrated a cover-up that deserves to be investigated and perhaps prosecuted.

Still, he believes Mr. Bruno has gotten carried away in recent months — to the point where it isn’t clear if the majority leader and his fellow Republicans stand for anything other than exposing the administration’s misdeeds.

“You can’t just fight on one front. You have to have an agenda,” he said.

On Friday, in the wake of his party’s humiliating defeat in a special Senate election in a northern district, Mr. Bruno accepted the resignation of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee’s longtime director, Edward Lurie, who was in charge of the campaign’s field operations. Calling Mr. Lurie a “mechanic who never had any strategic authority,” Mr. Stone insists that Mr. Bruno pinned the blame on the wrong guy. The man, he said, who ought to have taken the hit is John McArdle, Mr. Bruno’s tough-talking communications director whom Mr. Stone described as the primary force behind the Senate’s Troopergate monomania.

“John McArdle is a believer in one thing: Troopergate,” he said. “Anything that distracts from Troopergate, he’s against. Bruno needs to fire McArdle.”

So what should be the Republican agenda? Mr. Stone replies with two issues: taxes and crime. Those are areas he says where Mr. Spitzer is most vulnerable to attack and on which Republicans have failed to exploit.

“Mr. Bruno should be pounding on the fact that the governor wants to tax illegal drug transactions to balance his budget, instead of arresting drug dealers and getting them off the street,” he said.

“You have record numbers of violent criminals being paroled. The governor insists he has nothing to do with it, but his parole board is putting violent criminals back on the street. It’s a Dukakis. It’s an attitude about violent crime that is very typical of Manhattan liberals. ‘These people are victims.’ I’d be pounding on that,” he said.

He said Republicans, by dwelling on Mr. Spitzer’s ethics, have failed to focus attention on the hundreds of millions of dollars in fee increases and tax loophole closures that Mr. Spitzer put in his budget despite pledging not to raise taxes.

I point out that Mr. Spitzer is the one who supports placing a cap on school property taxes — an idea that has the backing of conservative policy groups like the Manhattan Institute — not the Republicans, who are siding with organized labor. “If Bruno cannot agree to a tax cap based on his relationship” with labor unions, Mr. Stone said, “then he needs to put a different tax proposal on the table that gets him back to his principles.”

He added, “There’s no question that the current Republican leadership has decided that they needed to co-opt a number of electoral funders who would not normally do business with Republicans.”

It’s a relationship that Mr. Stone suspects may have hurt Republicans in the end. “It’s fair to say, they are probably not maximizing their Republican turnout … because the Republican Party is perceived as a more moderate party.”

For now, Mr. Bruno has yet to signal any significant change in thinking but is open to fresh advice, if the hiring of a national pollster, Neil Newhouse, on Friday is any indication.

“They don’t need a new consultant. They need a strategy,” Mr. Stone said.

jacob@nysun.com