Four years ago, in his final run for re-election as governor, Mario Cuomo embodied the state Democratic Partys liberal traditions of government assistance for the poor, opportunities for minorities, and advocacy for the working class. His opponent, George Pataki, espoused the Republican Party's conservative ideals of government deregulation, tax reduction and prudent public sector spending. The line separating a Democrat from a Republican in New York state seemed clearly drawn.

Today, the state Democratic Party chairwoman, Judith Hope, speaks of her organization's "move toward the center" and repeats the party's new mantras of higher education, job creation and economic development, the latter two long standing favorites of state Republicans. In the state Assembly, Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver has cast himself and fellow Democrats as tax-cutters with his proposal to eliminate the state sales tax on clothing purchases. Silver took an active role in bringing the death penalty back to New York, raised little hue and cry about welfare reform hurting the poor, and got his supposedly liberal, New York City-dominated conference to agree to Gov. Pataki's call for cuts to the state's workers' compensation system.

For his part, Pataki, now the most prominent figure in the state Republican Party, speaks of environmental protection, the evils of teen-age smoking, and the rights of women and minorities almost as much as the need to stimulate business, fight crime and trim taxes

Supported in his 1994 election campaign by the Conservative Party, Pataki in 1996 took to the hustings asking voters to spend nearly $2 billion on environmental clean-up projects long sought by Democrats. He has preserved health insurance for the domestic partners of gays and lesbians (those in the state workforce and retirees covered under negotiated health plans), and pushed through a reform 'of the state's ballot access laws, both long sought by Democrats.

Pataki has signed new laws that could inflate the cost of health care by guaranteeing mothers of newborns at least 48 hours in the hospital, women undergoing mastectomies the right to remain in the hospital and potential breast cancer victims the right to receive second opinions, not to mention creating a registry to study possible links between pesticides and breast cancer.

New York's local and federal officials are acting and campaigning similarly. Sounding like a Republican, Democratic candidate Andrew Spano last fall promised voters a 29 percent drop in the welfare roles and a 15 percent cut in property taxes in his successful race for Westchester County executive.Democrat Gerald Jennings, in his winning re-election campaign for Albany mayor last year, embraced Pataki and his pro-business policies in, away most Republican mayors would have been proud to emulate.

Republican U.S. Reps.James Walsh of Syracuse and Amory Houghton of Corning urged House Republican leaders to bring a minimum wage increase to a vote. And Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato lately has trumpeted traditionally Democratic notes by attempting to portray himself as an environmentalist and proponent of women's issues.

It's neither illusion nor coincidence that New York Democrats and Republicans are sounding and acting strikingly similar these days. The GOP, with an eye on the Democrats' 3-2 statewide enrollment edge, has shown a willingness if not an eagerness to jettison certain traditional Republican policies and positions too conservative for New York's electorate, while adopting a number of democrat supported programs designed to play well among the public. The New York GOP thus is actively courting the female and environmental vote, not to mention taking advantage of the flooding of state coffers by the Wall Street boom to jack up spending. The Republicans who control the state Senate fought Pataki's proposed 1996 budget cuts to the State University of New York (SUNY) system, public education, health care and welfare, even cutting Pataki out of a proposed budget deal with Assembly Democrats that added millions of dollars in aid to distressed cities. The year before, Senate Republicans added $335 million to Pataki's first budget proposal, ultimately padding the spending plan by more than $1 billion in concert with Assembly Democrats and the governor. Outgoing Pataki Budget Director Patricia Woodworth says legislative Republicans in New York are far more attached to pork barrel spending than Rtpublicans she has worked with in other states. In New Yories upper house, that legacy dates back at least to the Rockefeller brand of Republicanism that held sway in the state in the 1960s and early 1970s.

For all of its leftward leanings on policy, however, the GOP largely has stayed on message, taking full advantage of the national mood swing to the right. Republicans are prudent conservatives, New York's GOP says. Democrats, the Republicans maintain, remain bleeding heart compulsive spendthrifts.

Equally tuned to the right-of-center mood of the electorate, Democrats, for their part, have been more reluctant to both spout and push their traditionally left-of-center policies, such as speaking for and working on behalf of the poor, which date back to Franklin Roosevelt.

As a result, New York Democrats have been trying to appear as something other than liberals. They approved reinstating the death penalty even though they knew Pataki, unlike his Democratic predecessors, would sign the bill. They tried to outflank Pataki on his promised income tax cuts, with Assembly Democrats pitching their own major reduction targeted at the middle class. They tried to match Pataki on his plan to cut school taxes. And 'messages from Democrats looking to take on Pataki in the 1998 election so far harp on jobs and economic development-items straight from the Republican lexicon.

There are "striking similarities" between the major parties on issues from "protecting research hospitals' to "the availability of medical care," says D'Amato, Pataki's political mentor and a Republican who runs with Conservative and Right-to-Life party backing. "There are always areas where Republicans and Democrats are dose."

Some say the blurring of the lines between the two major parties began during the New Deal, when the modern day welfare state was born.

"I submit that there haven't been philosophical differences between the two parties since 1932," says John Robert Greene, a professor of political science at Cazenovia College who says he hasn't taught the political party system in his basic American government class for the last five years. The parties, he says, have become irrelevant, except to raise "soft money" for national campaigns.

Cuomo traces the blending of the parties to electronic communication and polling. "Everyone gets Polled," he says- "The net result is you have this seething mass of opinion out there all the time. Politicians are now driven by the opinions of the people. They're driven by the polls. That was never true 1 00 years ago." Because they're poll-driven. Cuomo says Democrats and Republicans today tend to favor the same things: tax cuts and welfare reform, for example.

"Polls have told [politicians] they have to be careful about being too partisan," adds former state Democratic Chairman John Marino. "We may well be moving toward where there is and ... has to be less philosophical difference between the parties. Is that good? No. It's dangerous."

A willingness to allow polls as much as one's own preferences to influence policy has resulted in partisan battles becoming "less philosophical fights dm they are political," says Greene. "Positions ... shift depending on resection needs."

This Lombardi-esque "Winning is the Only Thing" mentality, in which pleasing the same polled constituencies increasingly appears to be a shared strategic objective, is driving the political agenda to the point where ideological fervor rarely steers the course of a campaign. "Any talk by Democrats or Republicans about tax cuts, women's issues, welfare reform, it really amounts to getting elected and reelected, and you've got to try to be where the majorities are to move forward," says the philosophically conservative yet politically practical Senate Majority leader Joseph Bruno of Rensselaer County. "The bottom line to a political party is to elect representatives to that party."

Yet if Bruno and Silver didn't need to protect their majority numbers in their respective houses, the ideologues would come out, says Cuomo. "If he didn't have to worry about his members getting re-elected, Joe Bruno would be as radical a conservative as we have in this country," Cuomo says. "Shelly [Silver) would be an intelligent liberal, an intelligent progressive.

Not only are politicians of both parties following the same polls, they're also getting money that fuels their election campaigns from the same groups. Such money, critics contend, unduly influences their policies. "Incumbency is I 00 percent a function of -money," political science professor Greene maintains. And both campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures have hit all-time highs.

In the state Legislature, both parties are funded in large measure by the same special interests: teachers, trial lawyers, insurance companies, doctors, dentists, public employee unions, real estate and some banking interests, hospitals, nursing homes, laborers, corporations and corporate political action committees. While some interest groups do favor one party over the other--downstate landlords back Republicans, while hospitals, nurses and other labor unions favor Democrats-"there are not dramatic differences," says Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. Even trial lawyers, who are seen as allies of Assembly Democrats, "came in big for Pataki at the beginning," he notes.

"The special interests push our elected officials with contributions, so you get that deadening between the two [parties)," says state Independence Party Chairman Jack Essenberg. "I certainly think-there is a blending and a blurring."

In New York, there also is a history of centrist compromise. Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault says split party government in the state legislature has become "semipermanent" because of lawmakers' control over reapportionment. Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats cede to each other the unilateral power to redraw their district lines and, thus, maintain control of their houses. That dynamic, Briffault says, "has forced the parties to have to deal with each other."

The dynamic in New York of having to deal with the other party has resulted in compromise as often as obstreperous posturing. The liberal Cuomo governed in the age of Reagan and instigated cuts to the SUNY "cm, resisted public employee union raises, took credit for whatever = cuts he could and built more prison cells than any other governor.

Pataki in 1995 and 1996 pushed austerity budgets through the state Legislature. But the Pataki of last year happily signed off on a budget that boosted spending by nearly $5 billion-the same amount of the deficit that he claimed Cuomo had irresponsibly bequeathed to him.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Assembly conference compromised with Pataki and Republicans by abolishing parole for repeat felony offenders and by instituting unprecedented limits on the state's welfare system.

The Business Council of New York State, long an ally of Republicans, has found downstate Democrats-traditionally the most liberal representatives of their party-more receptive lately to its job creation agenda

Richard Nathan, director of the Rockefeller Institute for the Study of the States, says there are more "Old-style, Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey-type Democrats left in New York than elsewhere"-such as Assembly Ways and Means Committee Chairman Herman Farrell of Manhattan. But David Shaffer, president of the Business Council's research arm, says Farrell "is very conscious of economic development. You have a speaker," he adds, "who says he's not a liberal. A few years ago, it would have been considered dangerous for a speaker to say that." It also was dangerous for a Democrat to propose a government takeover of the Long Island Lighting Company, as Cuomo did, earning scorn as a big-government liberal from candidate Pataki. But Pataki essentially adopted the idea and last year pushed it through the Legislature.

In New York government, "You have to negotiate," says Bruno. "We end up buying into each other's agenda somewhat in this state."

Much of what drives Democrats to act like Republicans and Republicans to act like Democrats, scores of scholars and politicos agree, also is the need to attract growing numbers of moderate voters. And, because constituencies are increasingly growing alienated with the major parties, broadening party bases wherever possible---even when it means abandoning traditional party messages and ideology-is becoming commonplace.

"The post-Cold War period has produced a rapid, if not frenetic move by both political parties into the center," says state Sen. Richard Dollinger, a Rochester Democrat. "Parts of ideology that were once considered far-left or far-right have become centrist issues," such as abortion rights and "leaner, more cost-efficient government," he says.

"As a consequence, political parties, which still have large constituent bases on the left and the right, find it's very difficult to cater to those constituencies," Dollinger says. 'What George Pataki has done is a classic demonstration of that. He's acting more like Mario Cuomo every day. He's spent a ton of money. I think he can no longer be described as a fiscal conservative from the spending point of view. And Mario Cuomo claimed he was the biggest tax cutter that had ever come along

"Many politicians are taking Bill Clinton's lead and have increasingly found that hitting it down the center of the fairway is clearly where the moderate voters are, and that's the bulk of the electorate," says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

"It is fair to say there's been a perceptible move toward the center in the Democratic Party," concedes state Democratic Chairwoman Hope. "However, I think there are fundamental differences that are important and that remain.' Hope goes on to say, however, that "people just want government that works. "I think that there is 8earl@ less litmus test identification with political parties and," she says, sounding somewhat like Pataki, "more interest in a government that's efficient and does what it was supposed to do."

Like Clinton, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Martin Connor of Brooklyn says he knows broadening his party's base is the key to victory, and in his case'probably the only way to win the majority in a Senate where Republicans outnumber Democrats 35 to 26. Shortly after Cuomo lost to Pataki in 1994 and Connor became Senate minority leader, Connor gathered his members for a conference and asked them what united them as Democrats. Some mentioned issues like abortion rights and gun control, but there are pro-life and pro-gun Senate Democrats. "We got down to the things that really relate to the middle class and working families," Connor says.

Democrats picked up scores of minor offices around the state in local elections last year by "recognizing what really moves the voters, what really brings back the mainstream voters," he says. "They're concerned about their jobs and supporting their families, and that's why they're worried about taxation, the quality of public schools, SUNY costs going up. Some of the issues that move advocacy groups and ideological groups, while not unimportant, are not what really [move] big pieces of the electorate."

"I don't think Democrats have abandoned the poor," says Dollinger. "I [just] think the Democratic party, as any political party, goes through a period of redefinition in the wake of political defeats. The reinvention process [since Cuomo's loss] has been difficult because of the absence ofa strong, statewide voice."

The absence of the kind of strength the parties once displayed also is &Placing large portions of the electorate. Since 1990, the number of so-called "blank" voters, or those not enrolled in any party, has jumped by more than half, while total statewide voter enrollment increased by a third. And split-ticket voting has replaced coattail voting as the norm.

The number of minor parties--and the number of voters enrolled in those parties-also has increased significantly during the 1990s.

Former Assembly Democratic fiscal aide Frank Mauro says changes in those minor parties have reflected and helped create the rightward drift of New York's political center. "The Liberal Party isn't as liberal as the Conservative Party is conservative now," says Mauro, head of Albany's Fiscal Policy Institute, a laborbacked think tank. "The Liberal Party is not pushing the parties that way as effectively [as] in the past. [State Conservative Party Chairman] Mike Long has been effective at using cross-endorsements [and] scorecards to move the parties. He's been effective at moving the locus of the debate. The Republicans and Conservatives, by working together, have moved the locus of the debate more to the right. The Democratic Party doesn't really stake out a real alternative. They're trying to be just a little more progressive than the Republicans.

Such is the case around the country. "Republicans nationwide have succeeded in shifting the nation's political agenda to the right," says Robert Spitzer, professor of political science at SUNY Cortland. "Liberalism is a dirty word--even in New York state these days. I think the [statej Republican Party is being pushed to the left from in-state pressures and the Democratic Party's being pushed to the right from out-of state pressures," Spitzer says.

In Virginia, newly--elected Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore won the 1997 election by pledging to repeal the state's hated car tax. His Democratic opponent, Don Beyer, tried to be a little more progressive by emphasizing the need to spend more money on education and by offering a tax credit as an alternative to Gilmore's bolder plan. In New- Jersey, Democrat James McGreevey attacked Republican Gov.Christine Todd Whitman from the right, charging she had allowed property taxes and automobile insurance rates to skyrocket. The little-known McGreevey came within a percentage point of pulling off an enormous upset.

Republicans in New York also have widened their base. Republican New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, governing in a city in which Democrats outnumber members of his party by 5 to 1, endorsed Cuomo in 1994 just before the former governor rolled up a big win in the city against Pataki. Two years later, Giuliani was defending and praising the illegal immigrant Population at a time when his party nationally was attacking the group. He has embraced gay rights and abortion rights, including the controversial "partial birth" abortions over which state Republicans made major political hay in the Senate.

What Giuliani has done, however, is nothing new, as the art of politics has always been to co-opt what's popular, says Gerald Benjamin, a SUNY College at New Paltz professor and former GOP chairman of the Ulster County Legislature. Former Republican governor and presidential nominee Thomas Dewey said, "'I can do the New Deal better than Roosevelt,"' Benjamin says.

Not everyone concedes that it's growing more difficult to tell a Democrat from a Republican in New York.

"The argument that they've become the same doesn't hold when you look at the kind of constituencies they represent," says Syracuse University political science professor Jeffrey Stonecash, who heads the Assembly's intern program, conducts polling for candidates and studies the demographics of legislative districts. "These show up in sharp differences on welfare, Medicaid reform, school finance. I think there are big differences."

Today's rank-and-file lawmaker also holds more sway than in the 1940s and 1950s, when party leaders "had enormous power," Stonecash says. "[L]egislators who want to get re-elected don't want to alienate their constituents. They get more adamant about fighting for their constituencies in conference."

The poor, he and others maintain, thus remain an effective constituency in isolated state legislative districts. And Republicans continue to represent the vast majority of affluent, white districts, while Democrats represent most of the poor, minority districts.

"Republicans have been unabashedly pro-workfare since the early'70s," says Tom Carroll, president of the anti-tax lobbying group CHANGE-NY. "The Democrats have gone along from time to time, but more as a trade than as something they wanted to do." Even a so-called "liberal Republican" like Sen. Roy Goodman of Manhattan, for whom Carroll once worked, has consistently backed tax cuts and GOP positions on crime, Carroll says.

Assembly Speaker Silver agrees that the key to understanding the fundamental difference between' his Democratic Party and the Republican Party is who they represent. While both parties talk up economic development, Democrats "won't sacrifice the working men and women of New York for the bottom line exclusively," he says. "Our emphasis is on the working men and women, the middle class-their tax burden, [and] educational and higher education opportunities for their children."

He contrasts that with Republican Pataki's push to increase tuition at SUNY. "The people [Republicans] represent, the elite of New York state, don't send their children to those schools," Silver says. "I think the distinction is very clear there."

Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon says that the Democrat centrist talk has not matched their actions. "Gov. Pataki, in partnership with Sen. Bruno, pushed hard for tax cuts and stood firm for tax cuts," McKeon says. "That's the only reason we got tax cuts. The rest is just rhetoric. We got welfare reform despite the efforts of some Democrats who wanted, for example, to unionize workfare people to give them permanent, full-time job status rather than temporary help. There remain significant differences on key issues."

State Republican Committee Chairman William Powers says any similarities between the parties are the result of Democrats trying to emulate the GOP lately, not because of any real transformation on their part. "They talk the talk, but they've got to walk the walk," Powers says. "I guarantee you that if Mario Cuomo were still in Albany today, we wouldn't be going through the tax cuts and the job growth New York state is going through. We would have been giving more away."

The Democratic Partys Hope says it is Powers' party that has changed its tune and that when the music stops playing the Republican Party's record will reveal that the GOP is out of step with the majority of New Yorkers. "On choice and the environment, you see Republicans giving a lot of rhetorical support to those issues, but in fact, George Pataki's administration has proposed selling licenses to pollute, selling pollution credits, and we've seen him veto legislation to enable localities on eastern Long Island to save thousands of acres of open space," she says.

While admitting similarities between the parties, Bruno adds a proviso: "If you deal philosophically with what you'd like to have happen, I think there are major differences between the two parties. I think the Republican Party is for generally less government, less intrusion in people's lives, letting people make their,own decisions in their personal lives and their businesses, and that government be limited primarily to doing things for the general public that they cai@t really do for themselves individually police protection, roads, bridges, schools, looking after the infirm. Government has an obligation.

"The Democrats believe in social welfare, in keeping people on welfare, in looking after people whether people need looking after or not," Bruno says. 'That's how they curry favor. That's how they get a response from a constituency. They don't want to cut taxes, philosophically. Why? Because it leaves less money for the social services they want to spend money on. Their philosophy, if left unattended, is very dose to socialism: government tending to all the people's needs. But where does the money come from?"

Certain litmus-test issues also continue to separate the parties, such as gun control and whether to ban so-called "partial-birth' abortions, which most Democrats oppose and "-; most Republicans favor. "That [is] a defining issue," says r, pollster John Zogby.

New York's shift toward the right, and the efforts of both parties to adjust to, and take advantage of, the movement, might really be nothing more than nature taking its course. 'New York is becoming a more normal place," says the Business Council's Shaffer. "The things that look exotic to us-that both parties are for economic development and against high taxes-are the norm in most other states in the country. New York has been the exception; we had this faith in big government. We ignored the economy as an issue, and that's changing."

But the odd symbiotic relationship of Democrats and Republicans in New York could be short-lived, as certain voices of the left have not died. "Working families haven't had any real increase in wages in 20 years," says Cuomo. "[Tlhe implicit statement is, 'This is as good as it gets. There is no solution. There's nothing we can do about it.' That's what the Democrats are saying. That's why they've been able to come together with the Republicans. Where," Cuomo asks, "are the Democratic voices?"

Some Democrats say they're trying to raise those voices, albeit unsuccessfully. "We're reactionary, not proactive,"complains one Democratic Assembly staff member. "We let issue after issue after issue get stolen from us: ballot access, the environmental bond act."

The problem, the Democratic staffer suggests, is the way the debate is framed. "If you ask, 'Should welfare recipient's benefits be cut off after five years,' everyone says, 'Yes,'" the staffer says. "'Why not ask, 'Should welfare recipient benefits be cut off even if someone is on a six-month waiting list for a job?"' Indeed, the key to the future may be to "redefine the conversation,' says New Paltz professor Benjamin. And in that, the former Republican lawmaker sees an opening for progressives. "Government reform is powerful," Benjamin says. "People in New York want positive government. This is not a popular view among Republicans ideologically, but behaviorally they seem to understand it. "My view is Republicans will wake up to higher education soon, and I think the tax-cutting agenda flies in the face of this and ultimately will be confronted by both parties," he says. "You can't keep cutting taxes over the long run. Positive government implies at least a protection of the resource base.

"Cuomo is saying the Democrats have done the wrong thing because they've lost their souls," Benjamin says. "I'm saying they've done the wrong thing because they haven't redefined [their beliefs on) reform [and] services-that's what's next. I think the conversation is on the verge of being redefined."