Is “Everything changes” the new “Mission accomplished?” So it seems for Governor Spitzer, who must be looking forward to moving past what was the most humbling week of his career.

For observers of Mr. Spitzer, it was almost uncomfortable to witness the swagger and poise of the governor crumple into the trembling and anxiety of a college student in fear of a late paper. The panic from the second floor of the Capitol as April 1 drew closer was ironic in light of those iconic Spitzer campaign ads that said: “For every New Yorker without a voice, listen, there’s one strong enough for all of us.”

Disappointment at the process and outcome of the budget has even fueled in the New York Post a nostalgia movement for Governor Pataki, whom it had been deriding for the last eight years. The speed with which the Post turned on the governor it had asked New Yorkers to vote for astonished the Albany press room. One wag suggested it was the quickest pirouette this side of the Bolshoi.

After the fact, it’s easy to second-guess the governor.

It’s clear that Mr. Spitzer miscalculated by not proposing a more austere budget back in January. The governor’s executive budget called for an increase in total spending of $7 billion. That’s money the Legislature ought to have been forced to fight for in negotiations. Instead, Mr. Spitzer, assuming he could pass a budget that hewed to his original plan, essentially handed the lawmakers a major spending hike before he even got to the table.

A second miscalculation was treating the speaker, Sheldon Silver, as an ally during negotiations. Mr. Spitzer completely failed to learn the lesson of the big showdown of the comptroller: the speaker is smarter than he is. In the case of the budget, the speaker shrewdly used Mr. Spitzer’s fear of Mr. Silver making a deal with the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, to take control of the process.

Substantively, the governor’s budget lacked consistency. Most glaringly, he insisted that the hospital industry bear its share while he proposed to spend almost $1.5 billion on a school system just as in need of moderation. The budget was pulled in different directions by two goals that sometimes worked against each other: one was fiscal restraint and other was a redistribution of resources to the poor and middle class.

The governor’s claim that his budget was transformative was short on credibility even before he got rolled by the Legislature. The one significant proposed tax cut was a progressive expansion of the School Tax Relief program, a Pataki creation that has done little to help taxpayers and epitomizes the cynicism of state policy.

Mr. Spitzer never made a convincing case that his education “foundation” aid formula was more meaningful than a maneuver to tilt the funding balance to New York City and other urban school districts and appease the teachers unions and the Campaign for Fiscal Equity crowd. Mr. Spitzer’s “contract for excellence” accountability plan, which has fallen off the radar as of late, seemed like a warmed-up version of No Child Left Behind.

It’s misguided, however, to look back at Mr. Pataki’s 1995 budget as the gold standard. As the New York Times noted at the time, the budget was “laden with one-shot revenue measures, backdoor borrowing, pork barrel spending, unfinanced spending requirements, a pension fund raid and questionable estimates of revenues and the costs of benefits” — the seeds of bad policy that would spread like weeds over those next 11 years.

The context today is that voters expect more from Mr. Spitzer than they did from Mr. Pataki, and Mr. Spitzer promised to be the anti-Pataki, who would have the energy, brains, and willpower to “change everything.” Now, Mr. Spitzer is talking about how slow and difficult it is to turn a “battleship inside a bathtub.”

The governor may have to lower expectations, but he doesn’t have to wait until next year to begin round two. He could make it his permanent policy to undermine the power of the 1199 SEIU hospital employees union one step at a time. The administration doesn’t have to wait until next year to try to cultivate coalitions of support within the majority conferences, particularly the Assembly Democrats. As long as Mr. Silver has a monopoly of power in the Assembly, Mr. Spitzer will never be able to pass a meaningful budget.

After all, Mr. Spitzer rose to fame not by dealing with powerful interests but by fighting them. It was a narrative that was easy to understand: He was the regulator, the protector of small investors, the sheriff of Wall Street. If Mr. Spitzer is to become the first Jewish president, he’ll need a more compelling narrative than, “I passed on-time budgets.” Mr. Spitzer would be wise to stop trying to turn around the battleship in the bathtub and to blow up the bathtub instead.