DID YOU HEAR the one about the governor who stuck a squealing, defecating piglet under each arm, parked outside the House chamber and held forth on the topic of legislative pork, so shaming legislative leaders that they apologized and vowed henceforth to work enthusiastically to pass whatever proposals the governor asked them to?

Well, if you did, you might want to share it with folks at the State House. They’ll get a good laugh out of that punch line.

Gov. Mark Sanford characterized it as a “light-hearted” attempt to poke fun at the situation, but when he hauled in the pigs to do to the floor outside the House chamber what the House had done to his critique of the budget a day earlier, he sent a message to TV viewers across the state that it was time to rise up against the Legislature.

In what came as no surprise to anybody except Mr. Sanford, representatives and some senators in both parties, from leaders to the rank-and-file, condemned the stunt and declared that he had doomed any chance of repairing the always-strained relationship between the reformist, outsider governor and the cliquish, status quo Legislature.

For his part, Mr. Sanford says it would be wrong to read Thursday’s stunt as an indication that he has given up on ever getting along with the Legislature. Sort of.

“I’m going to continue to work on building relationships with members of the Legislature,” he said a few hours after his staff returned the piglets to their Lexington County home. “But I’m also going to use every arrow in our quiver to try to raise issues.”

Focus on the second sentence. It’s the crucial one.

In explaining it, Mr. Sanford describes something of an epiphany he had last week about the relative power of relationships and arrows: On the night before the pigs, he held the annual Governor’s Mansion drop-in for legislators, where he “had drinks and dinner with the very people who had two hours before rolled over us on what we think is a very important constitutional issue and budget issue.” And in this surreal situation, it hit him: “It’s not until people are forced to change that they will change. You don’t change by being pals, making friends with everyone up there.”

Legislators can insist all they want that the problem is that the governor never learned to play well with others, Mr. Sanford decided. The real problem, as he sees it, is that legislators simply oppose his plans to clean up the state’s budgeting process, overhaul the structure of the government and infuse both with his libertarianism. And all the coddling in the world won’t change that.

“There are only two ways of skinning this cat,” he said. One is to spend his time paying proper obeisance to legislators rather than devising complex reform proposals, and accept the back-scratching, favor-trading process that has always defined South Carolina government. But as long as legislators feel no pressure to go along with his ideas, that approach will yield only minor legislative victories, since the purpose of the system is to sustain itself, and “that ain’t me.”

The other approach, he said, is to “turn this thing into a cause.”

It’s been clear since Mr. Sanford took office that he wasn’t going to accept the first approach. Whether he has tried hard enough to find a middle way is open to debate. Mr. Sanford and his staff clearly have mishandled our prickly legislators, largely because they still don’t understand or else refuse to conform to legislators’ sensitivities. But legislators have likewise failed or refused to understand Mr. Sanford or to give any; and they have exploited his weaknesses. More than once, legislative leaders have sat through multiple meetings discussing some initiative the governor was working on, then greeted its unveiling with claims that he had blindsided them.

What’s new is Mr. Sanford’s determination to mount a systematic and sustained effort to go over legislators’ heads to try to move his agenda. While he won’t be the only one or even the first to abandon any hope of reasoning with this Legislature — people who share his goals and people who oppose his goals also are trying to energize the public to force lawmakers’ hand — his popularity and his position give him the potential to be the most effective. Still, it’s no small task, and he seems to understand that.

“I’ve got to go to every single Rotary Club in the state throughout the summer and the fall, and get every single e-mail address, get enough people motivated to march on Columbia and change their minds,” he said. “I’ve got a responsibility to elevate ideas, but it takes the citizenry to get energized.

“Last night made it incredibly clear it really has to be a cause. You ask the question: How do the people of South Carolina have a better voice and greater control of their political system? The answer’s ‘with a lot of elbow grease.’ You’ve got to really commit to going to those Rotary Clubs and saying I need 25 of you guys to give me your e-mail addresses and be the pod, be the cell here in your part of the state to contact 25 other people and energize them.”

If Mr. Sanford is serious about this, then the coming months will be as much a test of the people of South Carolina as of their governor.

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