Dan

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July 2, 2009

Mark Sanford for President? It Was Always a Loony Idea

If you can leave aside the fact that Mark Sanford lied to his wife, lied to his staff, left the country without telling anyone, left no one in charge of the state and made himself completely unreachable for days on end – well, hey, you have to give the guy credit for thinking outside the box.

John Edwards picked out his mistress from among his campaign workers. Boring. Sanford? Argentina! Dude indulges his narcissistic fantasies with some serious exotic style.

Perhaps the only thing more absurd than Sanford’s behavior was the first reaction from conservative activists when it was learned that he had put a bullet through the heart of his political career:

Scratch one more potential 2012 presidential candidate!

Whoa. Whoa! President? President? Mark Sanford?

Where did this idea come from?

Well, it came, as it often does these days, from a number of places – all of them understandable to a degree, but still lacking something kind of important when it comes to picking a president:

1. Republicans are obsessed with picking out potential presidential candidates. The desire to knock off President Obama is so strong, and the presidential campaign cycle so endless, that for some people the only thing worth doing once an election ends is to start obsessing over the next one. We don’t govern in America. We just run for president.

2. He’s a “true conservative.” He takes all the right positions, and the base eats that up, even though they have no idea if he has the wherewithal upon taking office to turn any of these positions into actual policy. And that leads us to the danger inherent in getting behind almost anyone as a presidential candidate based on such little knowledge.

The one thing people didn’t know about Sanford – save for those in his inner circle – was that he is a self-absorbed, dishonest, irresponsible flake. Kind of important, don’t you think? Were we going to wait until he was sworn in as the 45^th president to find this out? Were we going to nominate him only to have Charleston insiders start whispering all this to the New York Times days before the first Obama/Sanford debate?

And as the days go by, and Sanford now admits he “crossed the line” with other women, it starts to become apparent that the guy is just really weird. Consider this passage from an interview with the Associated Press:

"This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said (mistress Maria) Chapur is his soul mate but he's trying to fall back in love with his wife.

Yeah. Hoo-kay. Good luck with that one, Mark. I realize some people are clinging like grim death to Sanford because he is a “true conservative,” but do you want to give the nuclear codes to this guy?

Ideology, biography and appeal are not without their importance when picking a president, but I would argue that all of them pale in comparison to character and governing ability.

Consider this scenario: President Sanford has to make a crucial decision about how to deal with a national security matter, when he gets a phone call from the malefactor in question informing him that if he doesn’t comply with the malefactor’s demands, his personal behavior will be exposed.

Blackmail. Not the sort of thing to which you want your president to be vulnerable.

Or consider this one, true conservatives: President Sanford is five votes short of passing the House bill that will repeal former President Obama’s cap-and-trade global warming law. It will take the personal appeal of the president to get the five House members to get on board.

And the president can’t be reached. By anyone. Staff. Congressional leaders. Vice President Cheney. Anyone. No one knows where he is, who he’s with or if he’s even clothed. Once he turns up, no one wants to take a political risk for his sake because dude is a flake.

Touting Sanford for president, even before his affair came to light, was absurd because most of those doing so knew nothing about his governing ability. Anyone can claim to be for this or that, but a president has to know how to get it done.

The base loved Sanford’s heroic stand against South Carolina taking the Obama stimulus money. But guess what. He couldn’t get the legislature on board, and South Carolina took the money anyway. Sanford could take the right stand, but he couldn’t govern effectively enough to get the right result. We’ve had enough presidents like that.

Oh yeah, and he’s a dishonest, eccentric, self-absorbed narcissist. Maybe the next time we start falling all over ourselves to tout someone as presidential material, we should find out how they actually do things, not just fall in love with them because of what they say.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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