Ed Koch, 1982: "Living in rural areas is a joke...Have you ever lived in the suburbs? It's sterile. It's numb..."

Eliot Spitzer, 2006: "If you drive from Schenectady to Niagara...it looks like Appalachia."

David Weidner's MarketWatch column on Spitzer's gaffe last weekend is picking up a head of steam. (Scott Sala, at Urban Elephants, likens Spitzer's comments in Weidner's piece to Howard Dean's "Confederate Flag" remark during the 2004 presidential campaign.) The problem for Spitzer isn't that he committed a gaffe - every candidate makes them, especially candidates who announce 2 years before election day they are running for office. The problem for Spitzer is that he's running for the Democratic nomination as a wealthy, liberal Manhattanite against a centrist, suburban, middle-class sounding Tom Suozzi.

Spitzer can talk about taking on Wall Street - which was a lot more popular with the voters after the dot com explosion - but he's been much less adept at talking about property taxes, public school deterioration and even, according to one other candidate for governor, the nuts and bolts of the $110 billion state budget.

Former Republican-Conservative Assemblyman John Faso's campaign issued this press release yesterday:

"New York has the highest state and local taxes in the nation," said Faso. "To cut school taxes, New York needs to reform costly mandates on school districts which drive up costs and don't improve education. New York also needs to dramatically reform the Medicaid system.

"Instead, the Legislature's response to New York's structural budget problems is to increase spending and engage in more costly borrowing.

"The response from Eliot Spitzer is silence."

In fact, Spitzer has issued no public comments on the current proposals by Gov. George Pataki and state lawmakers on the proposed budget.

It's not just that he blew off most of upstate as an Appalachia lookalike. But it's as if he doesn't know that between Schenectedy and Niagara are major operations for Fortune 500 companies like Xerox, Kodak and Corning. They employ some of the smartest people in the world, and have among the highest state tax burdens in the country. Their employees drive New York roads, pay local property taxes and send their kids to public schools. Very few of them have been to catered fundraisers in Denise Rich's Manhattan penthouse.

And, as Ed Koch discovered in 1982, they vote.

MORE: AP reports a fuller version of Spitzer's quote:

"If you drive from Schenectady to Niagara Falls, you'll see an economy that is devastated," Spitzer says on the tape. "It looks like Appalachia. This is not the New York we dream of."

Still, here is Rochester, N.Y.

Here is Syracuse.

Here is how down-and-out things are at Athena-Greece High School.

Here's Appalachia. And here. And here.

MORE: According to Spitzer's fellow Democrat, Sen. Hillary Clinton, even Appalachia doesn't look like Appalachia. Just this week, just days after Spitzer's remarks, the Development District Association of Appalachia honored Clinton for her advocacy of economic development in the region. According to this press release from the Appalachian Regional Commission:

Her support in Congress for the use of advanced telecommunications and technology for economic development has helped ARC invest more than $32 million over the last five years to bring these tools to some of the most rural parts of the Appalachian Region.

"It is a great honor to receive the Congressional Award from the Development District Association of Appalachia," Clinton said. "I appreciate greatly being nominated by my fellow New Yorkers. Together we've worked to spur economic growth in the Southern Tier, and now we need to continue making smart investments in transportation, broadband, and other technologies that will drive the twenty-first-century economy in New York."