The only way to succeed in Albany is to ask for nothing and demand everything. That’s the lesson that state lawmakers have taught Governor Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg, who each made the mistake of having a grand plan.

If you want something to get done in Albany, the best thing to do is to pretend you don’t have a care in the world. The other guy will eventually want something, at which point you still insist you don’t care, and wait and wait until the other guy is driven insane. Then you take and go back to pretending you don’t care.

The governor was aware of this dynamic when he met with the mayor and the Bush administration’s secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, here last month to discuss the fate of Mr. Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan and the bundle of federal grant money that’s supposedly tied with it.

“Don’t push Shelly too hard,” Mr. Spitzer cautioned Mr. Bloomberg on how to handle the speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver. The mayor was exasperated: “It’s always the same thing. What does Shelly want? How the f— should I know?” he said, according to an observer.

Mr. Bloomberg and his team of lobbyists proceeded with a do-it-or-else strategy. He presented lawmakers witha message of urgency: If they didn’t approve congestion pricing by July 16, New York would forfeit $500 million. He didn’t offer a back-up plan for relieving congestion that would enable New York to pocket the federal money even if congestion pricing wasn’t approved.

The problem for Mr. Bloomberg was that Mr. Silver didn’t buy the story. He sensed the deadline was an arbitrary date chosen by the mayor and Ms. Peters and that the $500 million figure was an inflated estimate. The mayor had put the figure at $400 million last month, and officials in the Spitzer administration are now privately saying available federal funds may be closer to $300 million. Mr. Silver figures it is not in the interest of Ms. Peters to exclude the nation’s largest city from her anti-congestion initiative. The transportation department needs to unload the $1.2 billion before Congress returns from its summer recess in September and re-appropriates everything that wasn’t given away. The most likely scenario is that Mr. Silver will find a way to secure the money without the Legislature committing itself to congestion pricing. If New York misses out on the grants, he’ll just blame the mayor for not coming up with a Plan B.

Mr. Spitzer had hoped to use congestion pricing as a bargaining chip to get agreements on the other issues he actually cares about, particularly campaign finance reform. Par for the course for a governor whose administration renounced Pataki-style horse-trading in those idealistic early days only to end up haggling like a merchant in the Grand Bazaar.

In June, he proposed an elegant trade: Sheldon Silver would agree to back congestion pricing and in return, the governor would deliver him a pay raise for lawmakers. Joseph Bruno and Senate Republicans would consent to restrictions on campaign finance after receiving assurances from Mr. Bloomberg that he would cushion the blow by writing the embattled Senate majority more checks for campaign contributions.

The trade blew up when Mr. Bruno’s Republican members refused to play along, ordering the Senate leader to reject the governor’s proposed campaign finance restrictions. Desperate to end the gridlock, Mr. Spitzer has appeared to remove much of his campaign finance demands from the table and is now willing to trade a legislative pay raise for just about anything, just as long as it resembles progress.

The winners, if you can call them that, are Messrs. Silver and Bruno. Hiding behind the feud between the governor and Mr. Bruno, Mr. Silver doesn’t appear to be the obstructionist. If he decides to deal on congestion pricing, it will be because he extracted major concessions from the governor and the mayor for his Democratic members. Having done the mayor’s bidding without actually doing anything, Mr. Bruno is now extending his hand for the mayor’s succor.

Perhaps Messrs. Bloomberg and Spitzer would have been in a stronger position had they stuck together from the beginning. The governor never showed enthusiasm for congestion pricing and seemed unwilling to spend political capital to make it happen. Had he been a devotee, he might have been able to persuade the mayor to stop handing out carrots to Republicans and bring out the stick. The last thing Republicans want is for the mayor to back a Democrat against a marginal member, such as Serphin Maltese in Queens.

The mayor could use that leverage to force Mr. Bruno’s hand on campaign finance. And had Messrs. Spitzer and Bloomberg been more united on congestion pricing, Mr. Silver and his members would have faced more public pressure to give the plan a shot. Instead, the mayor and governor stood apart, each wanting something and getting nothing.