Eliot Spitzer’s big budget compromise may have been a let-down for people who actually believed that Day One meant that everything was going to change.

But the officials who know Albany best weren’t surprised at all.

Take Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio, who has been in the legislature for as long as I’ve been alive.

“He’ll learn,” Seminerio told me this week up in Albany.

“The only thing that ever changes in Albany are the faces,” he said. “The system stays intact.”

More on Seminerio’s bracing realism here.

– Azi Paybarah