Fred Carter, Gov. Mark Sanford’s chief of staff for the past 10 months, is leaving that post this week to return to his regular job as president of Francis Marion University in Florence.

The State’s Aaron Sheinin sat down recently with Carter to discuss Sanford’s first year in office. Here are excerpts from that interview:

The State: On the campaign trail in 2002, then-candidate Mark Sanford visited you on the campus of Francis Marion. You told him he had no chance of winning. What else about your impressions of him has changed in the past year?

Carter: Please understand, I didn’t know him very well when I started working for him. I’ve come to fully appreciate, or at least better appreciate, the breadth of his interests. It’s an enormous kind of appreciation of the way that Mark works.

The State: Your past political experience was with former Gov. Carroll Campbell’s administration. The experience of this administration and the Campbell administration, policy-wise, is hugely different.

Carter: Oh, yeah. The greatest single difficulty I’ve had in this job has been — given Mark Sanford and given the way he goes about dealing with issues — it’s very difficult to predict where he’ll be with his next three or four moves. And any chief of staff would at least like to stay abreast of the governor they serve.

He’s also very unorthodox. That has appealed to me because it’s allowed me to pursue some ideas and notions and concepts that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work under a more orthodox governor.

The State: There is the “game” of politics that’s played here in the State House. Does he know the game?

Carter: Oh, he knows the game. He understands the game. I don’t think he has any great appreciation or appetite for the game, and he likes to constantly challenge those things that are orthodox.

The State: Did you ever have those “oh boy” moments, where you think, “Wow, he just said that.”

Carter: Oh, yeah. He goes about problem-solving and he goes about executive decision-making in a way that’s clearly unique to him. It’s certainly very effective in connecting with people in this state that are not in office. I’ll go back home on the weekend, and I’ll talk to someone who read an article about a question the governor raised in a budget hearing, and they’ll say, “Good for him. I’m glad that somebody is asking that kind of question.”

The State: And that’s the difference. He connects with them, even if he’s not connecting with people in the State House.

Carter: Yes, and you see that. It’s not simply the challenging of orthodox thought and approach, it’s also the time he’s willing to invest in it.

The State: What are the successes and challenges from the past year?

Carter: You touched on one earlier, his ability to communicate to people in this state. He probably does that better than any governor I’ve had occasion to observe. He’s remarkably successful at that, and a lot of it is that low-key style, self-deprecating humor. You see that with the folks who come in here with the evening office hours.

The other thing I noticed is I watch these people going in (to see the governor), and a lot are going in with enormous anticipation, some with enormous apprehension, and almost all of them come out with big smiles on their faces.

This is going to sound very strange, but I was prepared, certainly, to come to respect this man more and more. I don’t know that I was quite as prepared to come to like him as much as I have.

When you work that closely with someone over the course of a year in this type of fishbowl, frequently there tends to be more and more conflict and tension and the like.

In the process, I certainly came to appreciate more his view of the importance of public-private partnerships. I hope he’s come during the course of the year to appreciate my views on the importance of what the public sector does.

The State: How about the other side of the coin?

Carter: If there is a disappointment, it’s probably been that the developing of the legislative relationships is probably taking a bit longer than what many of us first anticipated.

The State: Why is that?

Carter: There are a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is that Mark Sanford is not a product of the South Carolina General Assembly.

That’s both good and bad. He’s constantly prone to challenge things and not accept “that’s the way it’s always been” as the explanation. It’s bad because it’s going to take a lot longer for those patterns and confidences and trust to develop, probably on both sides.

The State: But they will develop?

Carter: I think they are. They’re beginning to take shape. The speaker and the governor have met routinely now for a number of months.

One point I’m obligated to make — you see this when you stand behind him a lot, or sit behind him a lot — when he disagrees with people, there’s no rancor in his disagreement. He’s really very careful about not creating contentious or acrimonious exchanges, at least on his part.

The State: If he comes to you in early 2006 and says he’s running for re-election, what are you going to tell him? Last time, you told him he didn’t have a chance to win.

Carter: The first thing I’m going to do is have the good sense to keep my mouth shut and listen to what he has to tell me, rather than for me to make predictions on his political future. But I think he’ll run again, and, given what I’ve seen with his ability to connect to people in this state, I don’t think he’ll have anything to worry about.