Last week Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer announced the state should consider selling naming rights to public buildings, roads and bridges to help offset its projected budget shortage.

Clearly, he got this idea of corporate sponsorships from cruising through the sports section and looking at this season’s college football bowl lineup. You know, the Outback Bowl, the Continental Tire Bowl, the Capital One Bowl. And he’s thinking: Why not the Playskool Department of Education building?

Unfortunately, many people have since gone on the record mocking the Boy Wonder second-in-command. It seems they think this would be a bad idea.

Well, it’s about time somebody stood up for Andre. Here at the Gene Love Plumbing Talk About Town Political Ethics Center, we see no problem at all with corporate influence. Why, at our last Modern Exterminating Seminar on Naming Rights, everyone in the room thought it was a perfectly acceptable concept.

So we’d like to ask everybody to lay off the lieutenant governor. Apparently, a lot of people are just jealous of his terrific ideas. In fact, we believe there are other words to describe him. Visionary. Genius. Dreamer. Prodigy. Idea Man.

He’s right up there with one of the great idea men of all time, Bill Blazejowski, the scheming city morgue attendant in the 1982 movie “Night Shift.” Remember that great scene where Billy Blaze hits upon his best idea while considering a quicker way to make tuna fish sandwiches?

“Wait a minute! Why don’t they just mix the mayonnaise with the tuna in the can... Hold the phone! Why don’t they just feed the tuna fish mayonnaise! (Speaks into tape recorder) Call Starkist!”

Just like those of Billy Blaze, great ideas flow out of Andre faster than a truck speeding down Assembly Street.

He also reminds us of another great Renaissance Man of film and television: Jethro Bodine.Here was a guy who had only a sixth-grade education, but look at all he accomplished because he was willing to dream big.

Army general. Brain surgeon. Double-naught spy. Movie director. International playboy.

Now Jethro never served as California’s lieutenant governor, but he could have. He was simply too busy accomplishing all those other things. Just as we’re sure Andre could have been a brain surgeon or a double-naught spy if he had chosen.

(Andre is such a dynamo that we can almost hear Gov. Mark Sanford saying about him, as Jed Clampett used to say about Jethro, “Someday I got to have a long talk with that boy.”)

Word drifted out of the State House Monday that Andre is working on other big ideas to go with his naming-rights concept. Check them out. They could wipe the deficit right off the books.

• Having state troopers, as long as they’re driving around so fast, to also deliver pizzas for Domino’s, with all tip money they collect going directly to state coffers.

• Getting legislators to wear NASCAR-like jumpsuits festooned with corporate logos on the floors of the House and Senate. Think of what a business like Lizard’s Thicket would pay to have its emblem plastered across the stomach of Jakie Knotts.

• Turning the Governor’s Mansion into a theme park called Sanford Land, where an admission price of $43.95 — $32.95 for kids under 12 — gets you a tour of the grounds, a dry lecture on tax policy, and home movies of the Sanfords yachting.

But Andre’s best idea may be his latest plan to go on a trade mission to Cuba, where he’d one day like to see South Carolina goods on Cuban store shelves.

This is the idea Sanford likes best. Word has it the governor is so excited about it that he plans on expediting this mission as soon as possible. His goal would be to have Andre in Havana at Fidel Castro’s side working to make this exchange of goods a reality.

We hear Gov. Sanford’s even willing to leave Andre there as long as it takes to cut a deal.

His return date? January 2007.

Call Talk at (803) 771-8643 or e-mail ntwhite@thestate.com.