Meet Schwarzenegger, colossus of reform.

SOME of us thought that the election of a muscle-bound actor as governor of California was an amusing, if slightly creepy, sideshow--a lampoon of representative government.

Some of us thought that the candidate's pose as a populist tilting against his state's ossified power structure was just a dodge.

Hard as it may be to bell,eve, it now appears that some of us--we bow our hoary heads in shame, straining the cobwebs that enshroud them--were wrong.

After George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger is on his way to becoming the most significant U.S. political figure of the first decade of the new century. Whether he will actually rise to that status will likely be determined over the next eight months.

For a century, California has seen itself as a laboratory of progressive government and technological innovation. Yet, more recently that same progressivism and risk-taking has led the state government into disastrous mistakes, and the severity of their consequences is another source of Schwarzenegger's significance. The task he faces in trying to undo the damage is, appropriately enough, Herculean--even Conan-esque.

Governing magazine's Government Performance Project has given California its lowest rating among the 50 states. That C-minus grade ties the Golden State with Alabama, not the kind of company Californians like to think they deserve.

The report was careful to absolve Schwarzenegger's young administration from responsibility for the state's ills. To the contrary, "in many cases, California is a victim of its initiative process"--a legacy of the progressive era that allows voters to micromanage state government according to whatever spasmodic political impulse seizes them.

Thanks to Proposition 98, for example, 40 percent of the general revenue must be dedicated to elementary and secondary education. Other initiatives have mandated spending that accounts for an additional 30 percent of the budget. Budget writers in the legislature have no flexibility in responding to changing financial pressures or political priorities.

Yet it's unlikely that, even with a free hand, the present legislature would make the hard decisions required for sound budgeting. Even by today's standards, California's political class is unusually sclerotic. Of the 153 legislative and congressional seats, none switched party control last November, thanks to the legislature's painstaking gerrymandering.

Schwarzenegger's response has been to seize the initiative process, a large cause of the state government' s dysfunction.

For a special election in November he hopes to submit four initiatives that together would constitute radical, comprehensive political reform. One would require automatic spending cuts when the legislature fails to balance the books.

Another would allow school districts to initiate merit pay for teachers--a direct shot at the teacher unions that have resisted education reform. A third would help unburden the state of its ruinous public-pension obligations.

The fourth is the most far-reaching of all. It would empanel an independent committee to redraw boundaries for political districts--depriving the permanent legislature of its gerrymandering power and reintroducing competition to legislative elections.

Can he persuade voters to go along? A recent Field Poll showed public support for all but one of the proposals hovering about 50 percent. (Merit pay for teachers gets 60 percent support.)

If Schwarzenegger wins, he will emerge as a colossus of the U.S. political landscape. And he may even force Democrats to give thanks--because the foreign-born Republican governor can't run for president in 2008.

Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist.