IT FELT LIKE someone had posed one of those "What did you learn in school today?" questions. When our outsider governor was asked last week to assess his first legislative session, he said he had learned that the Legislature is very different from the Congress, where there are too many people to get to know and where special interests dominate. Here, he said, "it's much more about relationships."

A well-learned lesson. And one that helps explain why Mark Sanford took such a hands-off approach, at least early on, and had so little success in the General Assembly this year.

It also helps explain how he was able to pull a couple of robust rabbits out of his hat in the waning minutes of an otherwise dismal legislative session.

And it offers some hope that his most important initiatives might fare better next year.

About the best you can say about Mr. Sanford's relationship with most legislators at year's start is that there was no relationship. He's the first governor in three decades who was not a product of the Legislature. He was not the choice of most GOP legislators. (If he could do anything over, he said last week, he would spend the previous two years getting to know legislators. But, as he noted, he was sort of busy.)

Things quickly went south, partially because of who he is, partially because of what he did.

Mr. Sanford approaches government very differently than most legislators. He tackles big tasks -- restructuring government, overhauling the tax code, reforming the budgeting process, freeing local governments from legislative constraints -- that cow most elected officials.

Worse, when he started acting on those goals, he didn't observe the protocol legislators demand: He vetoed unconstitutional bills (as governors have always done) without warning all their supporters first. He waited until the day after the House passed the budget to start actively campaigning for the tax plan he had endorsed in his State of the State address. He started asking hard questions about longtime spending practices, and doing things legislators didn't dare do, like objecting to spending $500,000 on a monument in the midst of a fiscal crisis.

The backlash caught him off guard, but he started working harder than ever on developing those personal relationships. So much so that by the end of the session, he was able to get intimately involved in two major initiatives -- and, against long odds, get them passed.

When he found out that one of his signature issues -- campaign finance reform -- was in trouble with just days to go in the session, he started making phone calls. By the final afternoon of the session, he was in the Senate cloak room, pulling together the major players to hold together a deal that hours earlier had appeared doomed.

Next he pulled in the competing sides in a battle to lower the state's drunken driving level to 0.08 percent. One observer described how he went around the table, pointing to each participant and demanding, "What do you want? .‘.‘. What do you want?" until all the cards were on the table.

We've not seen this type of action from governors. They've worked the Legislature, but none has done so this publicly. None has become a fixture in the Senate cloak room. None has stood around the lobby chatting. None has wandered the halls of the legislative office buildings.

Mr. Sanford says ramping up his involvement was deliberate.

"What you've seen over the course of these five months is an increasing degree of personal involvement," he said last week. "I think you've seen the appropriate level of involvement and leadership. What you don't want to do in a legislatively dominated state is come in day one and say 'You guys don't know what you're doing. Here's how we're doing it.'‘"

"Anybody who comes into this system and says that he knows it all, one, is wrong and, two, is setting himself up for failure," he explained. "As a result of work this year, we'll be better positioned for setting priorities in the next session."

Mr. Sanford believes he's also building a solid foundation of support with the public (and polls indicate he's right) that will translate into more attentive legislators. That's something he hopes to capitalize on as he takes his campaign for reforms to several legislators' districts -- a strategy that could pay off, but also could backfire if legislators view it as too confrontational and intimidating.

There's no question that Mr. Sanford needs to keep working on relationships, and on how he and his staff communicate with legislators.

But this isn't a one-way street. The Legislature needs to work on listening. None of the actions that legislators say blindsided them should have come as a shock to anyone who actually paid attention to the things Mr. Sanford has said over and over, throughout the campaign, in his State of the State address, in meetings with legislators, in news conferences.

Part of the problem is that too many politicians have come to believe that politicians say a lot of things because they like to hear themselves talk, not because they mean them. And now they've come up against one who actually means what he says. If we're lucky, as they get to know him better, they'll figure that out.