COLUMBIA - Gov. Mark Sanford begins his second year in office this week with most of his campaign platform still unfulfilled.

Lawmakers are no closer than they were on Sanford's inauguration day one year ago Monday to passing the major reforms he called for: phasing out the state income tax; consolidating South Carolina's 33 public colleges and universities under a single board of regents to eliminate duplication and improve quality; and reorganizing government to give the governor control of essential state functions such as education and transportation.

But there's one promise on which the 43-year-old Republican has definitely made good, political observers agree. He said he would bring a new way of thinking to S.C. government, and he has.

"Sanford is different; he's not a politician like we've seen in modern times," said University of South Carolina political science professor Blease Graham.

• Sanford conducted a series of budget hearings with state agencies over the summer -- the first governor to do so -- in which he asked several agencies to justify their existence.

• He has called for allowing public colleges and universities to become private institutions, a proposal House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, says no one in the legislature supports.

• Now, with lawmakers returning to Columbia on Tuesday to begin the second year of their two-year session, Sanford has released a 300-page proposal that calls for increasing spending on schools and prisons by shrinking some state agencies and eliminating others -- a sure-fire way to draw legislative opposition.

Some lawmakers say they're baffled by the governor's unpredictability, often accompanied by lengthy philosophical discourses. "Governor Zen" is what Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston, calls Sanford.

In a telephone interview with The Observer on Friday, Sanford talked of "using the Socratic method of infusing another thought into a larger debate," as well as what he had learned from his reading of the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu.

Sanford said he has no use for " the standard political approach, where you know you can win on 2 agenda items, the debate is totally controlled, and you know the outcome before you begin the debate."

He said, "My angle is to throw out 20 items. Five of them will be loser ideas that aren't going anywhere, 10 of them will be worthy of debate and they'll cause conversation, and another five will be absolute keepers and they'll be picked up either by us or by a legislator and they're off and running.

"Where I come from is trying to have more of those conversations taking place," Sanford said. "Things will happen on their own, and you can't claim personal credit, but you've created a different environment wherein things are being questioned in a way they weren't in the past.

"It's sort of an amorphous hole," he said, "but it's aimed at the idea of creating a more accountable and hopefully responsive state government."

Some lawmakers, like Sen. Greg Gregory, R-Lancaster, say that Sanford brings a breath of fresh air to a hidebound S.C. political culture.

Gregory said Sanford approaches problems from the perspective of " `Let's try this and see if it works,' and doesn't worry about the risk. Legislators typically approach it by `Let's ruffle as few feathers as possible,' and hope it just corrects itself on its own."

Gregory said, "I think he's liked by members of the legislature, but frankly, his level of thought is on a much higher plane than the average member."

When Sanford was elected, unseating Democratic incumbent Jim Hodges, he brought with him a reputation as a political loner and maverick. Not within living memory had an S.C. governor come from so far outside the state's traditional political axis.

A Florida native who moved to the Beaufort area with his family when he was 17, he is the first S.C. governor since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era not to have grown up in the state. He is also the first governor in 60 years never to have served in the legislature.

He did serve six years in the U.S. Congress, from 1994 to 2000, where he was independent to the point of voting against projects for his own Lowcountry district that he thought were wasteful.

As governor, Sanford said Friday, he realizes how difficult it is to bring wholesale change to a place as culturally conservative as South Carolina.

"The most you're going to be able to get is incremental changes," he said. "What I'm trying to fight is a multifront war, sort of a guerrilla war, as opposed to your typical political frontal battle where there's this one piece of legislation and that's how you count up whether you've had a good year or a bad year."

As successes so far, Sanford named the moving of the Division of Motor Vehicles from the semi-independent Department of Public Safety into the governor's cabinet, and named changes at the state Department of Commerce that made its operations more open to public scrutiny while reducing staff by 26 percent.

"By having a bunch of little things going on and teeny little things happening in each one of those places over time," Sanford said, "that can evolve into fairly significant pieces of change."