Now this ostensibly reform-mindedmayor is firmly aligned with a fellow who talks a good reform game -but who never delivers. T HEIR styles are as different as their personalities, but George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani – each having inherited a fiscally and intellectually bankrupt government – have positioned New York well for an uncertain future.

What a pity if they blew it now.

And over Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, no less.

Here’s how it could happen.

Last week was budget week in Albany and at City Hall. The grifters and the grabbers – and a rare enough needy soul or two – came out in strength to keep tabs on their particular piece of the pie.

They were dissatisfied.

These days, they always are.

Because while Pataki and Giuliani were at swords’ points on policy (and politics) last week, the spending plans they proposed reflect the fiscal conservativism that the two men share.

There have been lapses, but now each has crafted a sober and responsible budget. The documents anticipate a slowing of the Wall Street boom that has fueled three very flush years.

Both the governor and mayor have largely resisted pressure to spend what remains of this windfall – there’s still a lot on hand – because each understands that the money is indeed a windfall.

Besides, so much found money has been pumped into the public fisc since 1996 that Pataki, in particular, wants to curb spending growth to allow the meal to be digested.

The grifters and the grabbers are not pleased; as usual, the rhetoric is florid.

Pataki’s proposals for New York’s Medicaid program – the nation’s most lavish – will “wreak havoc on the health-care industry and have a devastating effect on health care New Yorkers receive.”

So say, jointly, Ken Raske of the Greater New York Hospital Association, and health-care union president Dennis Rivera; their self-interest is obvious, and here is what they actually object to:

Pataki wants changes in Medicaid that will nudge the system closer to managed care. This, incidentally, will trim spending by about 2.4 percent; perhaps cause an underutilized hospital to close – and certainly eliminate some union jobs.

But it will have no discernible impact on the quality of actual health care.

Look at it this way:

Per-capita Medicaid spending in New York last year was 169 percent higher than in California, where the poor certainly are no healthier than here in New York. Pataki wants to trim the differential to 158 percent. Oh, woe!

As for the governor’s proposed 4-percent cut in the Medicaid home-care program – well, it’s hard to imagine a money tree more in need of pruning: Home health care in New York cost $2.35 billion last year – an eyepopping 152 percent more than in California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania combined!

Some “havoc.” Some “devastation.”

Certainly Giuliani wasn’t taken in.

“We’re on the same wavelength,” the mayor said of Pataki’s proposal. And why not; absent managed care, Medicaid threatens the city’s ability to support a full range of social spending.

But the mayor’s celebrated nose for nonsense failed him on education spending.

This is understandable, sort of. Pataki proposed only a modest increase in school aid for the city – right after launching a sweeping probe into charges of attendance fraud and related chicanery at the Board of Ed.

Giuliani appears to be taking this personally – bitterly, even.

But he shouldn’t.

Overall, state aid to the Board of Ed has gone up 25 percent over the past four years, from $3.3 billion annually to $4.2 billion. And it’s increased to record amounts in each of the past two years – $340 million, or 9.6 percent, in 1997 and $304 million, or 8 percent, last year.

Indeed, so much cash has floated down the Hudson River lately that the Board of Ed can’t spend it fast enough; it’s now running a $235-million surplus.

But too much is never enough.

Certainly not for Crew, who ripped Pataki’s aid proposal: “[It’s] not enough to cover inflation, let alone support new initiatives to boost student performance.”

Had the chancellor actually boosted any performance with the extra cash he collected over the past two years, he might have a point. But there’s no evidence that he did; quite the contrary, actually.

So his pique is misplaced.

Just why Giuliani felt it was necessary to enter this war on the side of the chancellor isn’t clear, but that’s what he did.

The mayor lashed out at Pataki’s probe, harshly criticizing the governor’s education-aid proposal – and then gave Crew virtually everything 110 Livingston St. wanted from the mayoral budget.

So now this ostensibly reform-minded mayor is firmly aligned with a fellow who talks a good reform game – but who never delivers.

And here’s what the mayor got from Crew in return:

*Regarding money, fulsome praise: “Unlike the governor, Mayor Giuliani has put forth a financial plan that places children over politics. [Giuliani] takes two major initiatives that have helped boost student achievements, Project Read and Project Arts, and embeds them permanently the board’s budget” – where they will remain long after they’ve lost whatever limited utility they might now have.

*Regarding reform, a poke in the eye: “The one area in which the mayor and I agree to disagree is his [public-school] voucher plan, which I have never supported” – and which he never will support, because innovation and experimentation threaten his turf.

Says Crew, in effect: “Give us our money, Mr. Mayor – and then butt out of our business.”

Giuliani wouldn’t take this from anyone else for a nanosecond.

He didn’t last April, when the subject was the City University: “They think I’m kidding, but I’m not,” he said of CUNY administrators. “I’m going to withhold all of the money for the school system unless [professors] take attendance and provide me with a record of how many students [there are] and how often they show up.”

The parallel with Pataki’s program isn’t absolute, but it’s close.

Pataki wants accountability from the Board of Ed, just as Giuliani seeks it of CUNY – just as each demands it of Medicaid, and of government in general.

They’ll never be buddies, but their collaboration has been good for New York. What a shame if it should founder on misplaced concern for Rudy Crew.