Commentary by Margaret Carlson
June 25 (Bloomberg) -- So it turns out that after five days of playing “Where in the world is Mark Sanford?” we -- and his mystified wife -- learned that the 2012 Republican presidential aspirant and popular two-term governor of South Carolina wasn’t communing with nature in the mountains but with a longtime friend in South America.
Upon returning yesterday, he told a reporter that he couldn’t understand all the fuss, as if everyone known for fiscal restraint (he must have paid full fare!) fills the car with camping gear (and packs his passport) only to drive to the Atlanta airport to wander off to Argentina like a latter-day Che Guevera tooling around on a motorcycle and keeping a diary.
If that were the case, he might be turning the whole thing into an award-winning film. There was a strong hint that wasn’t going to happen by about Day Three of his disappearance, when his wife told reporters, “I have not heard from my husband. I am taking care of my children.” The father of four missed Father’s Day, she said, because he needed “space.”
Quickly the initial explanation -- he needed a break alone after an exhaustive legislative session -- became inoperable. In a meandering press conference, Sanford apologized to everyone he had hurt -- people of faith like him; his four boys, his wife. He choked up when he apologized to a former aide, Tom Davis, who had been with him so long that he’d slept in the basement on the kids’ dinosaur sheets.
Long-Suffering Wives
We’ve seen many of these press conferences by now, usually with a long-suffering wife in a supporting role, as one politician after another owns up to adultery. Around the office, many of my colleagues were snickering at Sanford’s stream-of- consciousness explanation of how he’d come to this pass. I was riveted.
For all the politicians who have had to respond to shouted questions, we don’t often see a man thinking about what he’s done, reflecting out loud about “the odyssey that we’re all on in life with regard to the heart.”
Sanford was honest, he talked from that wrenching place of having fallen in love, fallen short of his vows and hoping somehow to salvage something of his life.
However genuine his explanation, he nonetheless joins the growing list of public officials who have lost their stature if not their jobs because of scandals: former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer; former North Carolina Senator John Edwards; former Idaho Senator Larry Craig, the toe-tapping non-gay caught in a compromising stance in a men’s restroom; Louisiana Senator David Vitter, associated with the D.C. Madam, and, most recently, Nevada Senator John Ensign.
‘Indescribable Pain’
Ensign’s press conference was the opposite of Sanford’s. It was all pre-empting the cuckolded husband who wrote a letter to Fox News describing the “indescribable pain and emotional suffering” Ensign had caused, leaving his “family in shambles.”
With the sprayed hair and manner of a croupier at a Las Vegas casino, Ensign admitted to an affair with the wife of his top aide, who was also his wife’s best friend. The couple and their son were on Ensign’s payroll until the affair ended when they were all fired.
Sanford is religious but not preachy. Ensign is a Republican out of the ramrod-straight Promise Keepers school of “godly” men building “strong marriages through biblical values.” Although Ensign lost his spot in the GOP leadership, he was embraced by his colleagues when he returned, as usually happens in the Senate in a “there but for the grace of God go I” solidarity. His favorability rating plummeted in his home state, but that being Nevada, people expect him to survive.
Comic Gold
Sanford will certainly fall out of the circle of light that surrounds any potential 2012 candidate. Just the word “Argentina” is comic gold, from taking two to tango to Evita. If his wife doesn’t forgive him, we won’t.
In the middle of his unexplained absence, the best Sanford’s staff could come up with was that he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail. If only he were.
Before Sanford is cast out, consider a poll last month that showed that more than half of voters in New York would like to have back former governor Spitzer as the legislature is locked out of the capitol in Albany and the state dissolves into political chaos.
Often a man who cheats on his wife cheats in his life. But Sanford didn’t look like such a man yesterday. He may be worth a second look before voters tell him to take a hike, for real this time.
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