In July, the Cato Institute gave New York’s George Pataki the highest rating of any governor in its biannual “Fiscal Report Card on America’s Governors.” A big win for the home team? You’d never know it by reading the New York newspapers. Neither the New York Times nor the Daily News made mention, and most upstate papers were equally indifferent. Only the New York Post ran a lead editorial.

There lies the dilemma for George Pataki, the unassuming former small-city mayor who has become New York’s first truly conservative governor in more than 75 years. Almost unnoticed, Pataki is hacking away at the suffocating undergrowth, the result of decades of liberal rule, that has left New York’s economy resembling some lost Mayan civilization. The whole enterprise is a conservative’s dream. Almost everywhere he turns, Pataki finds some tortuous vine strangling a forgotten piece of enterprise.