LOS ANGELES, 9 October 2003 — Californians have never known more about a potential governor. We’ve seen him naked on screen. We know about the Nazi father, the celebrity journalist wife, the bodybuilding titles, and the crude behavior toward women. We have seen him in theaters and imitated his accent.

Californians have never known less about a possible governor. We’ve never seen him hold office. We don’t know what programs he’ll cut, how he’ll balance the budget, how he’ll negotiate with recalcitrant legislators, or how he’ll manage the state’s bureaucracy.

Lawyers, businessmen, doctors, even actors leave behind their professions for politics. Arnold Schwarzenegger — at various times the most physically developed man in the world, Hollywood’s most famous actor, and now the 38th governor of California — has made the switch, too, with one critical difference. He is bringing his lifetime of personas, real and fictional, with him to office.

Schwarzenegger, who built his career on changing shape, could claim during his campaign to be just about anything. When talking about his strength in handling a challenge, he was the seven-time world champion in bodybuilding; on the Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern shows, an entertainer; to Central Valley alfalfa growers, a farm boy from Austria; to the California Chamber of Commerce, a businessman and investor; in East Los Angeles, a fellow hard-working immigrant.

“He really is six different personalities,’’ says his friend, fitness entrepreneur Augie Nieto. Schwarzenegger has never considered his true profession to be muscleman or actor or entrepreneur. Ask him, and he’ll tell you we’ve elected a salesman. His life, as he has told it in interviews and books over the past 25 years, is the story of a man who could sell anything — and has.

He has sold T-shirts, tank tops, lifting belts, gym bags, exercise videos, weights, brick-laying services, bodybuilding for women, magazines, bicycles, motorcycles, Hummers, books, seminars, movies, German food, cigars, restaurants, real estate, malls, sports for inner-city children, after-school programs, Milton Friedman, Austria, the English language, the United States — and, above all, self-improvement. Politics, Schwarzenegger told the Los Angeles Times in his only campaign interview with the newspaper, “is challenging, it’s refreshing, it’s a learning experience. It enriches me.’’ The details of bills and budgets are not of interest to him or voters, Schwarzenegger says. Being governor, he says, is another sales job. The product is California.

“I’m good at selling,’’ he says. “I’ve always done it in my whole life, and I will do it again in this campaign and as governor.’’

Schwarzenegger’s campaign strategists have offered him up almost as the personification of California, an icon, postcard-ready. “Imagine having this guy as a personal magnet, drawing people and investment to California,’’ says Rep. David Dreier, who is expected to head Schwarzenegger’s transition team.

But what kind of a leader does a salesman make? His campaign has offered few clues. And his multiple personas compound the difficulty of discerning his intentions. When he talks about “terminating’’ the budget deficit or pledges to “kick some butt’’ in Sacramento, what does he mean? Is he playing the “Terminator’’ or is he himself?

It hasn’t helped that Schwarzenegger, ever attuned to the public’s wishes, seems deaf to contradiction. Lastly, he sees himself less as a fixed character than as a piece of clay that he can work into nearly any form.

“That’s the way I always see my life. It’s a big play,’’ he told Esquire earlier this year.

As a bodybuilder, his strategy was “to build the mass first’’ — he swelled to more than 240 pounds — become as big as possible, and later use exercises to “chisel it down to get the quality.’’

That philosophy was born of his admiration for strength and has guided him since — grow big first, then refine your image.

Schwarzenegger was born in a small town in weakened postwar Austria on July 30, 1947. His father, Gustav, had returned from a defeated Nazi Army to become a small-town police chief. His mother, Aurelia, hit Schwarzenegger with a yardstick when he misbehaved. Before Schwarzenegger ever picked up a barbell, he had an outsized view of himself. “By the time I was 13, team sports no longer satisfied me,’’ he wrote in his autobiography.

Californians know Arnold Schwarzenegger well. Whoever he turns out to be.