The Nation -- When Governor Mark Sanford was merely thought to be clearing his mind on the Appalachian Trial on Naked Hiking Day and all the nanny-state fuss-budgets and media finger-pointers were freaking out, Joe Scarborough knew better: His pal Sanford was the real tax-hating, stimulus-refusing, rugged individual deal, a John Wayne 2.0 who'd stroll back into South Carolina's capital without a care in the world.
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Yeah! That's what I'm talking about, wrote RedState.com editor Erick Erickson who called it "refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man." Government can go take a hike.
So powerful is the myth of the diehard individualist against the state that even after Sanford's gripping press conference--in which he confessed to cheating on his wife, apologized for going AWOL, and emotionally fell apart--some of his fellow Ayn Rand men are trying to shrug off his affair by transferring blame to...Obama.
"The best way to put it--and it's working--he's trying to kill spirit," Rush Limbaugh said of the president. That's right, Obama drove Sanford into the arms of Maria Belen Chapur in Buenos Aires. "He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina," Rush logicified. "He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, 'What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!' One of the first things I thought."
Of course it's one of the first things Rush thought--the thrice- divorced, oxycondone addict clearly knows a thing or two about the urge to say the hell with it. But in Sanford's case, "it" is less Obama or the Federal government than the impossibly rigid fiscal and moral puritanism (enforced in no small part by Limbaugh's lash) that makes all those hardcore lone-wolves wanna bust the hell out.
Like many a sanctimonious sinner before him, Sanford's stands on gay marriage, abstinence-only education, and impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about sex have set him up to fall all the harder. But beneath the obvious hypocrisy of a family values Republican committing an offense-of-marriage act lies a deeper contradiction, one that must cleave the Republican soul. Whatever Sanford's--or John Ensign's, David Vitter's, or Larry Craig's--personal demons, their bad-boy adventures cut to the central irony of today's GOP: It's devoted to idea of private wealth and securing the rights of the individual against the tyranny of the majority, but its members themselves must adhere to an ever-narrowing set of acceptable thoughts.
Lest the religious "base" and the party's financiers witch-hunt them as RINOs, avowed conservatives must (and this is a partial list): deny global warming, vilify immigrants and Nancy Pelosi, praise Jesus and Ronald Reagan, and push for war, guns, torture, and excessive compensation for the oligarchy. They must, in effect, demand that society not be generous or feel human sympathy, not even for any of their own irregular yearnings. To fit through the smaller and smaller eye of the needle, all that laissez faire individuality must be severely trimmed.
And while it might seem intuitive that someone who is tight with money will be tight with his personal virtue, in fact nothing is farther from the truth, and the GOP's insistence on both at once is self-selecting a crew of outrageous hypocrites as party leaders. Even the most loyal Republican soldier may think he believes the whole litany of party rights and wrongs, but, whoopsy-daisy, there he is tapping his feet in public restrooms, asking prostitutes if they're good with diapers, bedding a campaign staffer who is his wife's best friend, or disabling his car's tracking device to flee to Argentina undetected.
For years, ever since he rode into the Gingrich congress in 1994, Mark Sanford didn't seem to be one of those extremists in secret distress, torn by the urges to both conform and transgress. In fact, he appeared to be the rare synthesis of those opposing fervors: an anti-government, culture-war populist who was comfortable alternating readings from the corporate and religious scripts. What with his Tea Party, Christian, and Wall Street bona fides (he of Goldman Sachs met his millionaire wife Jenny, of Lazard Freres, in the Hamptons), Sanford was nothing less than the 2012 presidential "holy grail," evangelical writer Warren Smith told The Daily Beast's Max Blumenthal. The governor, adds Tea Party macher Brendan Steinhauser, could have been the guy who finally "unites the different wings of the Republican Party. Economic conservatives, social conservatives, national security conservatives."
Maybe, but throughout his political career, Sanford has displayed an odd absolutism, a rigidity that allowed for zero exceptions to the rules.
Though Sanford's been getting kudos lately for evincing love for both wife and mistress, in 2000, he cast the sole vote in Congress against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.
In December, 1998, when Bob Livingston, Newt Gingrich's proposed successor as Speaker of the House, admitted to adultery, Sanford helped show him the door. Although Livingston hadn't broken the law (or even lied in a deposition, as Clinton had earlier that year), Sanford took a stern view worthy of an old Pharoah, telling CNN, "The bottom line...is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife." (As Sanford said in last week's press conference before admitting his affair, "I'm a bottom-line kind of guy.")
And the governor's ultimately failed fatwa against accepting stimulus money to rebuild South Carolina's devastated schools did not seem grafted on. He may have hoped it'd boost his presidential profile, but his stinginess is authentic. "If he found an index card in the garbage and saw that only one side of it had been used," said Will Folks, his former spokesman, "he would explain to the staffer, `This is how campaigns are lost.'"
When you've buried both your heart and your wallet under the same telltale floorboards, after a while maybe you just have to transgress. Repression itself can be a turn-on: denying sexual energy, like denying stim funds, can produce a build-up that's got to find a release. (No, no, don't give me money, withhold it, yes, yes, yes, withhold it!) No wonder Sanford felt the need to ease the torque in his head by digging holes on his estate--deep, hydraulically excavated holes, something he rhapsodized about to Maria, without adding the detail that, according to The American Conservative magazine, he paid some $300,000 to an African-American family whose eight-year-old daughter died after apparently falling into what has been variously described as a "pit" or a "retaining pond" on his property.
Democrats, as Fox News reminds us every day, have their share of sex scandals, and while they do suffer the consequences (Gary Hart, John Edwards, Clinton), their falls from grace lack the Goppers' full-fledged bingo! That may be because, as then-Representative Mark Sanford said of Clinton's apparent Teflon in 1998: "In politics you can get away with anything as long as it's what's expected. If people expect you to be a rascal, you can be a rascal."
And if Democrats are expected to be rascals, it's in part because conservatives have been painting them as wanton libertines about money and sex for ages--and by doing so, whoopsy-daisy, Republicans have painted themselves into one very tight corner. Sanford's biggest sin of all was exposing just how phony the Republican coalition between bankers and religious folks really is. The Holy Grail brings life only to the knight whose heart is true.
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