SACRAMENTO -- His friends say that Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante seems to have an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. Now the slow but steady Democrat, the grandson of Mexican immigrants who only this year managed to get his college diploma, is suddenly positioned to become California's governor.

Although Republican actor Arnold Schwarzenegger has dominated the news in the historic recall election of Gov. Gray Davis (D), it is Bustamante who has consistently matched or beaten the Hollywood star in recent polls among those vying to replace Davis if he is bounced from office five weeks from now.

Bustamante represents the Republicans' nightmare scenario, whereby Davis is recalled but Bustamante, in some ways more liberal than Davis, defeats a divided field of GOP candidates including Schwarzenegger, state Sen. Tom McClintock and former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth.

"If Gray Davis is Dr. Evil, then Cruz Bustamante is Mini-Me," Schwarzenegger spokesman Sean Walsh said. Schwarzenegger dismisses Bustamante as a Davis clone "with a receding hairline and a mustache."

But a senior elected Republican in Sacramento said: "This isn't funny. If we don't rally around one candidate, we're all going to wake up one morning and watch Cruz inaugurated as governor."

The 50-year-old married father of three from the state's poorer and more conservative agricultural heartland has spent his entire adult life in politics -- mostly as a staffer. But beginning in 1992, he has won every race he ran in -- in the California State Assembly, where he was elected speaker, then two statewide wins for the largely ceremonial post of lieutenant governor.

He is practiced in the art of compromise. His friends say he brings people together. His critics say he lacks depth. Bustamante says one of his greatest strengths is the ability "to listen, really listen, not to what people say, but what they mean."

Bustamante, who grew up in public housing and remembers toiling as a farmhand, picking grapes in his rural Central Valley, describes himself as the opposite of Schwarzenegger: a roly-poly working-class pol from the barrio who lives in a tract house in suburban Sacramento and rails against what he calls the greed of rapacious gas and energy companies.

"I think he's only doing what he thinks is the right thing to do. I don't think he has any great ambition to be governor, but he has taken advantage of every opportunity along the way," said Richard Lehman, a former House member from Fresno and now a Sacramento lobbyist, who employed Bustamante as a staffer about 30 years ago.

Bustamante is considered a moderate Democrat, though moderate in California can seem a bit more liberal outside the Golden State. He supports the death penalty and has sided with farmers against environmentalists. But he frequently peppers his conversations with references to the burdens carried by working people. He is proud of his role in reducing school class sizes and reforming welfare. He has proposed increasing income taxes on the wealthy and revising elements of California's property taxes on corporate real estate -- a move that challenges one of the foundations of Proposition 13, the "third rail" of California politics.

Bustamante is loyal to his Mexican American heritage ("you can tell I really like the food," patting his paunch) but rarely pushes his ethnicity. Indeed, he lost his ability to speak fluent Spanish when he enrolled in kindergarten. "I'm studying Spanish now, trying to improve my vocabulary," he said.

"He's like Juan Everyman," said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Education and Registration Project. Gonzalez predicts that Bustamante will draw Latinos to the polls to elect the first Hispanic governor in the state's modern history.

"His style is not electrifying. Women don't shriek. But that has appeal in the Latino community -- being humble is important," Gonzalez said. "It's like your dad being elected governor."

Bustamante agrees with the assessment. "Early on, I realized I wasn't going to be the smartest kid in class. But I knew if I worked hard -- and I work very, very hard -- I would overcome obstacles and make something of myself," he said. "I'm not flashy. I'm a straight shooter."

Although prominent Democrats were warned by state and national party officials and California labor leaders not to put their names forward as replacement candidates, Bustamante surprised many and took the plunge. "He was nobody's choice as party standard-bearer," said one Democratic strategist in California.

Bustamante explains his move as pragmatic. He looked at Davis's plummeting poll numbers, watched Schwarzenegger announce his bid on the Jay Leno show, and decided that the Democrats need a "just-in-case" candidate.

Some in his own party, however, suspect that Bustamante concluded that the unprecedented recall election was his best shot at the governor's mansion, as he would have faced stiff competition from fellow Democrats in the 2006 race.

Bustamante said his strategy is, first and foremost, to urge voters to reject a Davis recall, but then to punch his name as a replacement. After a month of stiff resistance, elected Democrats and the state's powerful unions have come around to support his "no on recall, yes on Bustamante" campaign. The state Democratic Party will likely endorse him soon.

With each passing day, however, it is more clear that Bustamante is mounting a serious bid to replace Davis. The two men have never been close -- aides describe their relationship as frosty -- and now they are seeking support and money from the same donors and constituencies.

A week ago, Bustamante offered his "tough love" proposals to close California's more than $8 billion budget deficit by raising taxes on commercial properties and cigarettes; closing corporate tax loopholes; and increasing income taxes for California's wealthy. He urges unspecified cuts in state government. He would also revoke the tripling of the car tax implemented by Davis to close the budget shortfall.

Then on Thursday, Bustamante lashed out at soaring fuel costs. Standing in front of a gas station in Sacramento, he accused the oil companies of "price gouging" and said if elected governor he would seek an amendment to the California constitution to allow the state to regulate prices for petroleum, just as it does for telephone rates and electricity. Such regulation of gasoline has never been attempted in any other state, and the proposal has created a howl of protest from free-market Republicans.

"They can raise the prices anytime they want and they use any excuse. They blame world instability or a break in a pipeline in Arizona or whatever," said Bustamante, who compares the sudden price increases at the pump to the market manipulation of the electricity market orchestrated by companies such as Enron Corp.

Bustamante parts company with Davis on the motivation for the recall. Davis has described it as a right-wing conspiracy to steal elections. Bustamante said: "It's about voters believing their leaders aren't listening to them. The voters want to put everything on the table. They want the governor to explain everything he's doing and why. And they want to hear specific proposals from all the other candidates."

In an interview at his campaign offices Friday, Bustamante described a childhood in California's Central Valley farmlands, hot in the summer, foggy in the winter, a place he recalls as "miles and miles of miles and miles."

In Dinuba, where he was born, both sets of grandparents, who emigrated from Mexico, lived side by side. When he was 5 years old, the family moved to the nearby tiny town of San Joaquin. His father was a barber, a bartender, a propane gas deliveryman and a chess and trumpet player. During the summer harvest, the family picked vegetables. "Working for us," Bustamante said, "was eating."

He spoke little but Spanish until kindergarten. In high school, he was a lineman on the football team and, he said, only a so-so student. He was thinking about becoming a butcher, when his father heard about a job in Washington for his son, working as an intern on constituent services for Rep. B.F. Sisk. Bustamante took to politics quickly.

"I spotted him early as a very talented, hard-working guy. He had a very good political sense. He's paid his dues. He's done virtually every job there is, from top to bottom," said Lehman, the former Democratic House member who hired Bustamante in 1977. Later, Bustamante served as a staffer for then-Assemblyman Bruce Bronzan.

Like several former bosses and other allies, Bronzan remarked on Bustamante's luck. "Cruz has been fortunate. He's always the right person, right time," he said. "He works real hard, but without doing anything, opportunities have come to him, more than him taking history and bending it his way."

Though he twice won statewide office for his current post, Bustamante's allies recognize that most voters do not know much about him. "By nature, he is a moderate person, not only ideologically, but in everything. Moderate lifestyle, modest home. He wouldn't know how to be pretentious. He is like your perfect neighbor. He'd be out there cutting the grass, and if your lawn needed mowing, he'd cut it, too," Bronzan said.

Bustamante fell out with Davis early in their first terms when Bustamante publicly blasted Davis for not being aggressive enough in his opposition to the implementation of Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative, later struck down by the courts, that sought to deny government services to illegal immigrants.

That stand won Bustamante kudos from the Latino community; the ghost of Prop 187 has returned to the political stage. Schwarzenegger voted for the measure, and the co-chairman of the actor's campaign is former governor Pete Wilson, the architect of the initiative.

Last week, Bustamante had to defend himself for his membership in college in MEChA, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, which critics label a "racist" organization that advocated a separate nation for Mexicans in the American Southwest. Bustamante waves away the charges, saying MEChA at California State University at Fresno was an activist group seeking clout for Latino students -- not secession.

"They ask me about my radical ethnic agenda," Bustamante said. That agenda, he said, in an oft-used refrain, is "good jobs, good schools, safe streets and opportunity."

Bustamante, though, still hears about a gaffe he made when giving a speech in February 2001 to a labor group celebrating Black History Month, in which he used a racial slur, instead of the word "Negro." He immediately apologized and says today, "To talk about this has been humiliating, each and every time."

Bustamante is also being attacked for his close ties with California's increasingly powerful Indian tribes that run casinos. In the money race, Indians have been and are today some of his biggest backers. Bustamante defends himself by saying he is not some millionaire like Schwarzenegger who can fund his own race. "I'm envious of Arnold's physique," he said, "but I'd rather have his checkbook."