ALBANY - Two weeks ago, Democratic Attorney General Eliot Spitzer telephoned Republican George Pataki as the governor lay in a hospital bed recovering from an appendectomy.

“I told him, the first call you should always get after surgery is from your lawyer,” Spitzer joked then to Pataki. Spitzer, despite his different political party, is the administration's lawyer under the constitution. The friends and allies who have stood together over the last seven years to push anti-crime, pro-environment and government reform initiatives shared a laugh.

They weren't laughing last week.

Conflicts, ranging from whether to jail a union president who led New York City's transit strike, to Spitzer's campaign comments on a landmark education funding case and Pataki's economic policies, suddenly exposed a chasm between the two.

A rift between the odd power couple in Albany, where partisanship is often as collegial as a Yankees-Red Sox game in extra innings, roared open between Spitzer and Pataki since Monday. By Thursday both sides appeared to be trying to push the other into a tight corner.

“Spitzer's thinking Democratic primary,” said Lee Miringoff, pollster for Marist College and longtime observer of New York politics. “On the Pataki side, this has to do with his legacy and looking perhaps to take the best from New York and move on.”

Voters should expect more of this.

“With the primary coming up, it doesn't hurt Spitzer at all to be fighting with Pataki,” said Gerald Benjamin, political science professor and a dean at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

He has written about the uncommon Pataki-Spitzer relationship, one that didn't always sit well with the Spitzer's base.