Gov. Sanford Confesses

Thursday, June 25, 2009

I liked it better when it looked as if South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had gone all Henry David Thoreau on us.

Now, it turns out, he went all . . . well, you can fill in the blank. John Ensign? John Edwards? David Vitter?

There was, while it lasted, something attractive in the notion that the Republican governor had gone missing to go missing; "I went to the woods" and all that. As Sanford said yesterday afternoon at the now ritualistic news conference-turned-admission-of-infidelity, "when you live in the zone of politics," there is no zone of privacy, no BlackBerry-free moment.

So the image of Sanford, breaking free to hike the Appalachian Trail, was appealing and reminiscent of President Obama's wistful longing to escape nonstop scrutiny. The day before, on Tuesday, the president was on CBS talking about the sense of isolated normalcy that he can only achieve playing golf these days.

"It is the only time . . . where you almost feel normal," Obama said. "In the sense that you're not in a bubble. There are a whole bunch of Secret Service guys, but they're sort of in the woods. . . . It feels as if . . . you're out of the container. . . . I realize now, it's as close as you're going to get to being outside of this place."

But the Sanford story was, of course, so weird from the start that you knew in the back of your mind that this couldn't be anywhere near the whole truth.

As, inevitably, it wasn't. "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude," Thoreau wrote. Sanford managed to, though it took a trip to Argentina to find her.

So we lurched from not having enough information about the governor to having too much. Way too much. From his rambling start about high school hikes on the Appalachian Trail and "adventure trips" in college, you wanted to turn off the television, but you couldn't -- and so there was Sanford talking about "that whole sparking thing" and "serious overdrive."

Really, if Sanford's sparking, I don't want to know about it, whatever drive he's in. As Sanford said, "I'll give you way more detail than you'll ever want." I don't want to think about Eliot Spitzer with his socks on or Larry Craig with his wide stance. And the New Age-y talk about how "the odyssey that we're all on in life is with regard to heart" may be harder to take than the seamy sexual details. "The biggest self of self is indeed self," Sanford said. Indeed.

I know the point is long past when the press could look the other way at a politician's dalliances. But if politicians can't stop themselves from straying, could they at least stop themselves from holding news conferences to announce it? We can't cover these things up, but do we really have to keep covering them live?

-- Ruth Marcus

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At least Gov. Mark Sanford faced the music alone -- and I'll bet the music running through his head was one of those dramatic, sweeping tangos that provide the perfect soundtrack for a visit to Buenos Aires. Tango lyrics are, essentially, blues lyrics in Spanish: Somebody did somebody wrong. And that's what happened.

The only commendable thing Sanford has done lately was to stand before the television cameras by himself as he admitted that his mysterious five-day absence was in fact a trip to Argentina -- to see the woman with whom he has been having an extramarital affair for the past year.

He didn't follow the lead of Larry Craig, Eliot Spitzer and all the others who somehow induced their aggrieved wives to literally stand by their men. That always seemed to be the ultimate betrayal, and I wondered why on earth those women would go along with the act. Humiliation is bad enough when it's endured in private. It must be excruciating when it's made into public display -- for the benefit of the offending husband's career.

Enough about Sanford's wife, Jenny, and their children, who did nothing to deserve all this. As for Sanford, if ever he deserved to be considered a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, he's out of the picture now. For good. As he said today: "End of story."

If you want to be president, you can't be seen as flaky and erratic. You can't disappear from your job -- as governor -- without telling a soul where you are. You can't have your staff say you're "hiking the Appalachian Trail" when that's clearly not credible. You can't claim you decided on a whim to go to Buenos Aires and drive along the coastline when there's no real coastline to drive along in the city. You seem like a bit of a loon.

And maybe you are. Sanford, remember, waged a battle all the way to the South Carolina Supreme Court to avoid taking $700 million in funds from the stimulus package -- money intended to keep many of his constituents from losing their jobs. The high court had to order him to take the money, and the experience of losing that fight was apparently so stressful that he had to dash off to Buenos Aires to see his amiguita.

Sanford is an ideologue, not a politician. Yes, it's natural to feel some compassion for him -- but no one should lament the passing of his political future. He's too weird to be a governor, much less a president.

-- Eugene Robinson