Voters have discombobulated budgeting by mandating spending without providing revenues, other than promiscuous borrowing. Whitman favors making it harder -- requiring more signatures -- to get measures on ballots, limiting the number on ballots in particular elections, and requiring the ballot language to specify the costs of measures being voted on.

She emphatically opposes a change that many proponents of a new Constitution favor -- eliminating the requirement of a two-thirds vote of both houses of the Legislature to pass a budget or raise taxes. Without those provisions, "taxes would be so high we might not have a state left." Today's most pressing problem -- government in the grip of public employees unions -- is, she thinks, ripe for improvement: 85 percent of the state's unionized employees are working without contracts.

To change Sacramento, which Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego television stations barely cover, she must find new ways to communicate with a disconnected public. Because California is second among the states only to Wisconsin in Internet connectivity, she hopes to directly arouse the state for challenges such as modernizing the water storage and delivery system that was designed for a California with half today's population.

"There is," she says, "plenty of water in California -- we can't get it from where it is to where it is needed." The result, partly because of aggressive environmentalism, is "a slow-motion Katrina" in some Central Valley towns where unemployment is above 40 percent.

Whitman, like her rivals for the nomination (state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, another Silicon Valley success, and former Rep. Tom Campbell), is pro-choice. That normally is a problem with a significant portion of the Republican nominating electorate, but the collapse of California's once-characteristic confidence has concentrated minds on other things.

Because legislators feel validated by volume, the Legislature is, she says, a "bill machine." She vows to wield the veto power as vigorously as did Republican Govs. Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian, who cast 1,890 and 2,298, vetoes respectively. The current calamitous governor wanted, as movie stars do, to be loved, but Whitman says tersely: "Getting elected is a popularity contest. Governing is the opposite."

Although California is a blue state, it has had Republican governors for 30 of the last 43 years. The Republican revival nationally might begin here next year.