HOLLYWOOD - Fifteen years ago, when Pete Wilson was thinking about giving up his U.S. Senate seat and running for governor of California, a very prominent political strategist privately chastised him for considering such a move because "California is ungovernable."

Undeterred, Wilson ran for governor and wound up serving eight often tumultuous years, a governorship punctuated by severe economic decline, a monumental budget crisis, riots, earthquakes and floods - not to mention a very contentious re-election campaign.

Wilson, along with the state's other three most recent ex-governors, returned to the question of California's governability in a roundtable discussion that was to be broadcast on public television Thursday night.

Wilson, fellow Republican George Deukmejian and Democrats Jerry Brown and Gray Davis batted around the issue for 45 minutes, after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - who ousted Davis last fall in a recall election - had his say all by himself.

Schwarzenegger proclaimed, with characteristic enthusiasm, that governing California "has been really fantastic - extremely challenging and a lot of fun" and that he sees no structural barriers to governance. "You can get anything done," he declared. "It's just a matter of attitude. I've seen only the positive side of it."

The four ex-governors, who ran the state for 29 years, were not as sanguine, each having experienced the negative side of high office as well as the positive. And, despite their obvious differences of ideology and party, they were remarkably in sync over impediments to responsive and effective governance in the nation's most populous and most complex state - especially a Legislature frozen by factional and ideological fragmentation.

Brown, who is now the mayor of Oakland and contemplating a run for attorney general in 2006, Deukmejian and Wilson all said that under the circumstances, California needs what Brown described as "an aggressive, imaginative chief executive" to challenge the Legislature and, when necessary, marshal public opinion at the ballot box to move policy, along with more executive powers.

Brown may have been taking an indirect shot at Davis, his one-time chief aide, who was faulted for being too passive on energy and the budget.

"The truth is every one of us would prefer to be benevolent dictators in office," Deukmejian said, only half in jest.

Bringing the governors together to discuss the state's obvious crisis of governance was a fine idea, but the execution by producers of "California Connected," a foundation-financed public affairs program, was flawed.

Lisa McCree, a perky transplant from "Good Morning America" and the show's new host, obviously knows little about California and its governance beyond what the scriptwriters fed to her. Thus, she kept repeating the same rather superficial points about process and failed to delve deeply into the issue in questioning the former chief executives - or Schwarzenegger, for that matter.

In fact, California's governance maladies stem from the complex, often contradictory nature of the state itself. With its immense geographic, economic and cultural diversity - the latter a relatively new phenomenon - California has myriad policy issues, but those same factors also have become an impediment to governance. The state has lost its vital consensus on public policy goals, and without that civic compass, its politicians tend to ignore major issues and pursue trivial ones. The procedural issues that McRee pushed - such as term limits or the two-thirds votes of the Legislature on budgets - may exacerbate the problem, but they are not the problem.

Voters sensed that something was amiss, threw Davis out of office and elected a political novice as his successor on the promise to clean up the mess in Sacramento. But merely changing governors, or altering political procedures, will not cure the underlying conundrum.

The real issue - one that "California Connected" and McRee missed a sterling opportunity to pursue - is whether the public's anger at Davis will morph into a new sense of civic purpose that will impel politicians to act in the larger public interest or whether California is destined to be, as Wilson was advised 15 years ago, ungovernable.