THIS IS WHY we wanted a strong governor to begin with.

The budget that Gov. Mark Sanford proposed last week is the strongest vindication of the Cabinet system of government since our state took its first steps in that direction 11 years ago.

I’m not saying this because of the specific proposals, although many of them are things we’ve advocated for a long time. Aside from those mentioned in the above editorial, there are such praiseworthy elements as the reduction of annualizations (paying for ongoing expenses with one-time money) to the lowest point in a decade, and the fact that he not only ends the practice of raiding trust funds but actually restores some of the money purloined from those accounts.

Nor am I overlooking the fact that there are some things, including some important things, that trouble me in this budget — most particularly that it fails to fund education at a level that will maintain the momentum of reform. That is so significant a problem that we will address it separately in an editorial later this week.

But what I am saying is that finally, we’ve got someone able and willing to tie the details of government to a grand vision for the whole state.

Neither of the first two governors after the partial move to a Cabinet system in 1993 fully seized the opportunity to change our state for the better. Each stuck to a few areas of particular interest, and failed to embrace all of state government and try to lead it in a new direction.

This newspaper has long advocated putting the reins of the executive branch fully into the hands of the elected chief executive because the failure to do so has helped hold our state back for the past century and more. For too long, there was no one in a position to look at all of our state’s needs and harness the resources of the state to meet them with maximum effectiveness.

The logical person to do that would be someone elected not from a single district as are legislators, but by all of the people of the state. Other states had figured that out long ago and given the authority to the governor. We had not, and so we continued to flounder about, pulled in hundreds of different directions by legislators with competing aims and state agencies that answered to no one but their own independent boards.

The 1993 restructuring only gave about a third of the executive branch — in terms of share of the budget — to the governor. But the budget package Gov. Sanford presented last week disregards that limitation. It looks at government whole, as it should.

That may suggest that a governor could have done this without even a partial Cabinet. Maybe, but no one did. In fact, the first time a South Carolina governor even tried to present an “executive budget” (Carroll Campbell, in 1988), it was rejected by lawmakers as mere effrontery. It took a sea change in the way we have thought about the governor’s role in this state to pave the way for the kind of holistic vision Gov. Sanford set out last week. The restructuring of 1993, as incomplete as it was, helped to further that change.

The governor proposes to complete the job, making him fully accountable for the rest of the executive branch while streamlining it at the same time. Whatever else lawmakers do, they should enact the restructuring without delay — especially now that the governor has gone so far to validate the concepts underlying it.

Watch for many individuals and factions to start picking the governor’s plan apart. Every ox it gores — and it gores a lot of them — has its protectors. But look at the same time for many lawmakers to welcome these proposals. That’s because the governor has given them political cover to do some things that have needed doing for a long time, but that no one was willing to take the political heat for. He has done the dirty work that legislative bodies find almost impossible — he has set priorities. He has said “no” to some and “yes” to others. And he has not done so capriciously. He has backed up his decisions with detailed documentation and made each an integral part of a more or less seamless whole.

This is Mark Sanford’s finest hour as governor. Many of the character quirks that have made him less than successful up to this point — his obsession for detail, combined paradoxically with a penchant for ignoring practicalities in favor of big ideas — are the very things that made it possible for him to construct this tour de force over the past six months or so. At such a moment as this, his drawbacks become virtues.

I hope it won’t be his last such hour. I hope this marks a turnaround in his performance. I hope he can follow through. Not for his sake, but because this approach to leadership — not necessarily all the details, but the very act of picking a direction, making a case for it and daring to lead — is what our state has long needed.

He has yet to prove himself in a number of other ways — from the practical matter of selling his ideas in the Legislature to proving to the rest of us that he fully understands the critical role of public education in moving our state forward.

But this is a very good start.

Write to Mr. Warthen at P.O. Box 1333, Columbia, S.C. 29202, or bwarthen@thestate.com.