SHUTTING down USC Union and USC Salkehatchie have come to symbolize Gov. Mark Sanford’s efforts to change the way things are done in Columbia.

But when Mr. Sanford released his third state budget last week, the Union campus was fully funded, and Salkehatchie’s budget was cut by just $100,000.

Why spend money to keep them open this year, he was asked? Because, he told reporters matter-of-factly, Sen. Harvey Peeler asked him to.

Excuse me? Mark Sanford is proposing to spend $190 million he thinks is wasted money just because a senator asked him to?

Is this the same Mark Sanford who has spent the better part of three years complaining to anyone who would listen — with complete justification — about how government in South Carolina is based on personal relationships rather than policy? Who has seen his agenda stymied time after time because he refused to appoint close relatives of influential legislators to state boards and engage in other forms of horse-trading? And now he’s plunking down $190 million just to get along with the chairman of the Senate Republican Caucus?

“When I don’t change heart, I’m viewed as stubborn and an iconoclast and philosophically rigid,” he said. “And when I do change, I’m viewed as political.”

Governing in South Carolina, he said, “is a process of nudging the ball. You can’t force anything. You continually nudge it.”

And so for Charleston — home now to both the president pro tempore of the Senate and the speaker of the House — he provides full funding for a couple of pet projects he vetoed last year: $116,896 for the Southern Maritime Collection and $300,000 for the Avery Center at the College of Charleston. (Maybe more than a couple; those are the ones the hometown paper singled out.)

There’s no proposal to cut lottery advertising (although he will still push his other smart lottery proposal: reducing sales commissions for retailers). No raid on the endowed chairs program. No “gifts” from Santee Cooper to balance out the budget. No hits to the budgets of colleges that hire lobbyists.

It’s not an easy thing for Mr. Sanford, giving up a fight. So you’ll forgive him if, the more he tried to explain, the more he began to sound a bit, well, defensive.

“We’ve made our viewpoints clear,” he said. “People know where we are.... Politics is the art of the possible, period.... We also think it’s important not to disappear on the points” that are most important.

Translation: He hasn’t morphed into Monty Hall.

That means that while the redundant two-year colleges are in his budget, Clemson Public Service Activities still gets whacked by $3 million; Special Olympics and 4H and the S.C. Student Legislature and other mom-and-apple-pie programs are canned, along with such legislative favorites as Spoleto Festival USA and the Southeastern Wildlife Expo and security for the Hunley museum. Not that anyone takes his hit list too seriously any more, since the Legislature has made it clear it’s DOA.

Political opponents, pointing to the $150 tax rebate checks he wants to send to every family, call this a political, election-year budget. Well of course it is; every budget is political, and every one passed in an even year is an election-year budget. There is no elected official who ignores politics, particularly when his name is going to be on the ballot. But this budget is no more pandering than Mr. Sanford’s previous budgets, which offered even larger — and permanent — tax breaks. (Besides, the governor says the rebates would be returned through the income tax system, which suggests folks wouldn’t see the cash until long after Election Day.)

What is different this year is that Mr. Sanford is willing to play ball with legislators — a two-edged sword for a governor who is wearing on some voters’ nerves because he hasn’t gotten much accomplished but remains admired by at least as many others precisely because he refuses to engage in political logrolling. (Is it a coincidence that with the speaker of the House no longer from Greenville, he has turned his sights to the Upstate, and is defunding that city’s prized University Center?)

The initial reviews indicated the battle-picking could pay off. “What I particularly like was the sense that I had that he wanted us all working together on these goals," House Speaker Bobby Harrell told The Greenville News.

Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper told The Post and Courier in Charleston that “There is some stuff that will obviously be controversial, but they did a really good job this year.”

Mr. Harrell’s comments might not mean a lot; he’s a diplomatic man. Mr. Cooper is not; he has seemed to go out of his way in the past to take shots at the governor. For him to say anything remotely positive about this governor is astounding.

If that’s a sign of things to come, then the important question is which other battles the governor will choose to fight this year.

Will he push for his artificial spending limits, or empowering local governments? The tax rebates, or government restructuring? Backdoor vouchers (and yes, he still preaches them in his budget document, although he doesn’t propose them this year), or school district consolidation?

In short, will our governor spend whatever political capital his more accommodating ways earn him focusing on an agenda that will help all of South Carolina, or one that will simply advance his narrow ideological priorities?

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.