Don’t count out Governor Spitzer. For all of the talk that he is doomed to have the adjective “embattled” tattooed on his name, my sense is that Mr. Spitzer has an opportunity for recovery in 2008.

The assumption has been that Mr. Spitzer’s mistakes have flowed from flaws in his character. What has been underestimated is the extent to which inexperience and basic governing incompetence have also shaped Mr. Spitzer’s first year.

Take his illegal immigrant license plan, for instance. The basic error he committed was failing to do the necessary polling beforehand, which would have foreshadowed the need either to drop this plan or to be prepared to fight for it on idealistic terms. He thought it would be easy and it wasn’t (my own view is that it would have been possible to carry that argument if he’d had a pro-growth set of policies to match it). With a more realistic sense of things, he will be better prepared when he has a controversial plan.

Troopergate was another rookie mistake — a botched political hit. Had the governor’s office encouraged the Times Union of Albany to do its own reporting rather than spoon-feed them dirt on Senate leader Joseph Bruno’s questionable use of subsidized state travel, it would have avoided the mess. Moreover, a more experienced governor would have realized that state laws governing the use of the air-fleet were so lax, that it was useless to attack Mr. Bruno on those grounds.

Mr. Spitzer’s administration was also plagued by the sense that it did not have control over its agencies. The elevation of Paul Francis, a no-nonsense experienced corporate executive, to director of operations is a sign that the governor is determined to keep agencies under a tight leash, helping to avoid situations like last year’s embarrassment when the tax department plotted to raise online retail taxes before the holiday season.

The common view is that Mr. Spitzer is incapable of controlling his temper and avoiding obnoxious remarks about his political adversaries. I’d point out that it’s been a whole three months since Mr. Spitzer was last caught with his foot in his mouth. For the governor, that’s a heroic streak of restraint.

His aides insist Mr. Spitzer has realized that it’s better to sit back and watch Mr. Bruno and Speaker Silver trade schoolyard taunts. Increasingly, it is the usually chummy Mr. Bruno, not the governor, who seems to have anger management issues.

Mr. Spitzer also has the advantage of entering budget season. This is good news for the governor because it gives him the opportunity to play the role of responsible financial steward instead of ideological crusader. The big issue won’t be bickering over campaign finance legislation but a struggle over spending.

It’s the time of the year when lawmakers have to prove their loyalty to special interests.

Few recall it, but the New York Post in March published editorials praising Mr. Spitzer’s effort to curb Medicaid spending and deriding Mr. Bruno as a “shill” of the health care industry. Look for Mr. Spitzer once again to position to the right of Senate Republicans on spending.

Mr. Spitzer also has an ace in the hole: He controls the budget for capital pork projects. Hundreds of millions of dollars in projects outlined by the Senate and the Assembly have been stalled because Mr. Spitzer has refused to approve them. Aides to the governor are suggesting that Mr. Spitzer may hold those projects hostage against this year, depriving lawmakers of a crucial opportunity to reward their constituents before Election Day.

Of course, if Mr. Spitzer denies the Legislature its capital pork, it will deny him a budget. But the governor’s fear of a late budget was another mark of inexperience. My bet is that this time around, he will be less willing to compromise for the sake of an on-time budget. After all, it’s lawmakers who face re-election this year, not the governor. The wild card in all of this is the Troopergate investigations. Mr. Spitzer has yet to testify before the Public Integrity Commission, and we still don’t know the full story behind the administration’s collusion with the state police. The dynamic, however, appears to be shifting in the governor’s favor. The public’s patience is wearing thin. By the time the Albany County district attorney, David Soares and the ethics commission complete their probes, almost a year will have passed since the controversy broke. At this point, the bigger scandal is the incompetence with which the two investigative bodies have carried out their responsibilities.

Mr. Soares’s resuscitation of his probe looks nothing more than a feeble attempt to salvage his reputation after allowing the Spitzer administration to essentially write the first report on the case. One gets the sense that integrity commission under the leadership of its globetrotting executive director Herbert Teitelbaum is out to sea, with little idea of how to do its job other than to blindly subpoena every document ever produced by the Spitzer administration.

To those who argue that our embattled governor hasn’t hit rock bottom, I say prove me wrong. It would make for some more interesting copy.

Jacob@nysun.com