To Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, nothing is impossible. Except, perhaps, open government.

Schwarzenegger is marching smartly through his "to-do" list of campaign promises like a man on a mission. He has rolled back the car tax, repealed driver's licenses for illegal immigrants, stabilized the state's finances and now overhauled the troubled workers' compensation system.

He is, the governor says, trying to eliminate the words "can't" and "impossible" from the Capitol vocabulary.

"The 'impossible' is to be going out, because everything is possible," he told reporters last week. "We see it all the time. We just have to have a positive attitude, and we always have to work for the betterment of the state."

But one campaign promise Schwarzenegger made over and over - to bring sunshine to state government, to end the era of backroom deals and midnight lawmaking - has eluded him. It's the only force he has run into so far that he does not seem able to overcome.

"The people of this state do not trust their government," Schwarzenegger said before he was elected. "They feel it is corrupted by dirty money, closed doors and backroom dealings."

The answer, he said, was sunshine: "I will open up the windows and doors of government. ... No more decisions in the dark."

But both of the major deals he has negotiated as governor, first on the budget and now on workers' compensation, were completed in the middle of the night, behind closed doors. They were then presented to lawmakers as all-or-nothing deals, with Schwarzenegger and four legislative leaders applying pressure to rank-and-file members who had little chance to review what they were voting on and no opportunity to amend it.

As the negotiations over workers' compensation came to a close last week, even key legislators who had been deeply involved with this issue for years were kept from seeing the language of the agreement.

The deal was completed at about 3 a.m. on April 15, and a two-house conference committee quickly convened to ratify a measure that almost nobody had read. A day later, both houses of the Legislature passed the measure, with only a handful of opposing votes.

Schwarzenegger didn't invent this culture. He inherited it. But he seems comfortable with the style. His "smoking tent" - a canvas enclosure in the open-air courtyard in the center of his Capitol office suite - has already become famous as the place where Schwarzenegger likes to cut his deals.

He gets points for being open with lawmakers, calling meeting after meeting in his office with key negotiators from both parties. Also invited in are the interest group lobbyists - those people he threatened repeatedly to sweep from Sacramento with the broom he used as a prop as he campaigned up and down the state.

It's not realistic, of course, to expect such sensitive negotiations to be done completely in the open.

Lobbyists wouldn't feel free to offer proposals and counterproposals if everyone knew what everyone else's position was at each turn in the talks.

But it is not asking too much for a tentative deal, once blessed by the leadership, to be fully vetted in a series of public hearings, and for legislators to be given the chance to adopt amendments. This is a good way to avoid mistakes, and to allow a broader cross-section of people to be a part of any agreement. It's also the right thing to do.

Is it easy? No. Along with the sunshine comes criticism from whatever group believes its interest is at stake. If they know what is in the bill, advocates can explain to lawmakers exactly why they think the deal is a bad one. They can bring decision-makers real-life examples of the potential consequences of their actions. And they can apply good old-fashioned political pressure to try to keep them from voting for the agreement.

But all of that is part of the messy process in a democracy. And it is what Schwarzenegger promised when he was running for governor.

Schwarzenegger acknowledged last week that the process on workers' compensation did not live up to the standard he set during the campaign. The problem, he said, was that last Friday was the deadline for submitting signatures he had gathered for a ballot measure on the same subject. The negotiations took longer than he expected, and if the bill hadn't been rushed to a vote, he would have been forced to submit the signatures as a back-up plan. Nobody wanted that.

Yet Schwarzenegger knew months ago that April 16 was a drop-dead day. In fact, the Democratic leaders in the Legislature were almost certainly stalling to push the governor up against his self-imposed deadline, hoping to extract concessions from him at the last minute. Schwarzenegger said he had no choice but to go along with their schedule.

"In principle, I always want everyone to be participating and to have an open forum and to talk and to let the public look inside," Schwarzenegger said. "But in this case, it just was not possible to do that the way we wanted to do it."

Impossible?