If the party of “family values” can keep its members where they belong, the GOP may yet come up with a viable presidential candidate.
But another one seems to have killed his own potential this week when South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, admitted to a long-term extramarital affair in Argentina.
The whistle was blown when the father of four, who’d disappeared for a five-day Father’s Day weekend after telling staffers he was going for a nature hike on the Appalachian Trial, was seen in Atlanta Wednesday morning by McClatchy Newspapers reporter Gina Smith as he got off a flight from Buenos Aires.
Mark Sanford
Later that day, Sanford, 49, faced the cameras inside the South Carolina Statehouse and tearfully confessed to his deceit and infidelity, saying, “The bottom line is this – I have been unfaithful to my wife.”
Unlike the common tableau when shame-faced politicians have publicly admitted to their dalliances, Sanford’s wife, Jenny, 46, was not standing at his side. She instead issued a statement after the press event, saying she asked him to leave their home two weeks ago in a trial separation, that she believes they can reconcile, and that she still loves her man. The couple reportedly had been attending Bible study meetings for couples after his wife found out about the affair five months ago.
Sanford evidently was already conversant with at least one passage from the Good Book. In several 2008 emails published Wednesday on the website of The State newspaper in Columbia, the governor wrote to a Buenos Aires woman identified only as Maria about their “impossible situation of love.”
After mentioning “that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light,” Sanford wrote that he found comfort “where I often look for advice and counsel … (I)n I Corinthians 13 it simply says that, ‘Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude, Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices in the right, Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.’” The passage is a favorite for wedding ceremonies.
If the Republican Party, in its scramble to find a viable candidate for the 2012 presidential election, takes advice from Sanford himself when he voted to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, it’ll have to scratch another name off its list.
“He lied under a different oath,” Sanford said of Clinton, “and that’s the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”
Another Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, admitted to his own extramarital sporting life a little more than a week before Sanford’s mea culpa, and resigned as chairman of the Republican Senate Policy Committee.
Sanford said he doesn’t plan to resign as governor, but that he would quit his post as chair of the Republican Governors Association, to be succeeded by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
Sanford recently raised his own national profile by trying to refuse $700 million for his state from the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package, saying such money should be used only to reduce the nation’s budget deficit. He took his fight to the state Supreme Court and lost.
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