Eliot Spitzer’s insistence on characterizing upstate New York as the new Appalachia perfectly illustrates the old adage that you don’t have to knock a person down just to lift him up. When speaking recently at the West Side Institutional Synagogue in Manhattan, he said: “You drive from Schenectady over to Niagara Falls, you see an upstate economy that is devastated. It looks like Appalachia.”

Initially, I thought he had misspoken. But instead of correcting himself, he aggressively defended his comments, making it abundantly clear that he does not understand upstate New York, does not understand its history, does not understand its culture, and does not understand what has gone wrong with its economy. His dubious solicitude betrays the classic, condescending attitude of well-to-do residents of Manhattan, who often see little of value in New York north of the weekend communities in the central Hudson Valley.

Whether Mr. Spitzer has spent time in the real Appalachia is an open question. As a former correspondent for CBS News, I filed reports from the hills and hollows of Appalachia, from places like Pike County, Ky., where the poverty was real and men’s faces wore the sorrow of a life spent working in the coal mines. The poverty I saw there was palpable and troubling.

As a child born in a housing project in Chicago, I am not embarrassed to admit that the poverty I witnessed in Appalachia had a great effect on me. It helped me appreciate the degree to which poverty crosses color lines. It taught me that the roots of poverty are tangled and complex.

When we talk about Appalachia, we are not talking about economic statistics or census data alone. That is not what the word Appalachia means. Based on indisputable sociological findings, it came to mean backward and uneducated. In the influential if often misguided book, “The Other America,” which helped launched the War on Poverty, Michael Harrington wrote that a visitor to a Midwestern city could safely conclude that a neighborhood was poor, if country music was being played. In effect, he was saying, culture and economics were intertwined.

Upstate New York has serious economic problems caused by decades of disinvestment and out-migration. But upstate New York is not Appalachia and never has been. The reality is that for most of its history, upstate New York has been one of the most dynamic, progressive, prosperous, and educated parts of America. Economic stagnation upstate has occurred in spite of our history, the result of bad policies foisted on the state by legislators in Albany, who do not understand that ideas have consequences, and, therefore, bad ideas have bad consequences.

The problem is that Mr. Spitzer clearly has no idea why the economy in upstate New York continues to lag behind the rest of the country, in spite of a robust national recovery. And that is what is important in this debate. We can talk all we want, as left-liberal politicians like Mr. Spitzer do, about targeted investments or the importance of the “creative class,” but the reality is that New York is just too darn expensive. Taxes are too high. Workers Compensation costs are too high. Energy costs are too high. And the cost of health insurance is too high.

The problem is that Sheldon Silver and his fellow members of the Assembly majority have been unwilling to stop runaway spending, reduce the unfunded mandates, and relax the regulations that cause high taxes, contribute to bloated bureaucracies at all levels of government, and make insurance costs so expensive.

Unfortunately, Republicans have not been bold enough or resourceful enough to make the Democrats pay for these wrong-headed policies. The result is the economic stagnation that everyone in upstate New York recognizes, as we lose our edge in an increasingly competitive global economy.

Admitting that we have a problem is important. Mr. Spitzer has done that, even if he insulted millions of New Yorkers in the process. Consciously, willfully refusing to admit what causes the problem, however, only makes the situation worse. Upstate New York needs and deserves a helping hand from Albany. Thinking intelligently about how we can do that is what this gubernatorial campaign should be about, not foolish and inaccurate epithets.

Mr. Daniels served as secretary of state in the Pataki administration and is a candidate for governor as a Republican.