I always thought that Mac Barber, in his kind and gentle fashion, was one of the strangest people I’d ever encountered in writing about politics. But I didn’t consider the amazing levels of nuttiness that would be achieved by South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.
Sanford, until roughly Thursday afternoon of last week, was considered a possible candidate for president in 2012 because of the support he enjoys from the rightward fringes of the Republican Party. He was one of a handful of GOP governors who tried to reject the federal stimulus funds coming to his state, a stance that was pleasing to the Republican base but mightily pissed off Sanford’s colleagues in the legislature who had to worry about how state government would keep operating. The courts eventually bitch-slapped Sanford and ruled that South Carolina had to accept the entire $700 million, even if it meant that some of the money would go to schools that educate black children.
Last Thursday, not long after that adverse ruling, Sanford got behind the wheel of a state police vehicle and drove away, without any of his security people in tow. He disappeared for the entire Father’s Day weekend, with the story of his disappearance finally breaking in the media on Monday.
There were all sorts of puzzling statements made by Sanford’s staffers, who kept saying they “knew” where the governor was but could never say just where that location might be. His wife said she wasn’t “worried” about the fact that her husband had vanished for a weekend. Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, on the other hand, was irritated that he could not get a straight answer from Sanford’s aides as to who was officially running the state. “I cannot take lightly that his staff has not had communication with him for more than four days and that no one, including his own family, knows his whereabouts,” Bauer said.
The story the governor’s people finally settled on was that he had left South Carolina to go “hiking” on the Appalachian Trail so that he might “kind of clear his head after the legislative session.”
Perhaps “hiking” is a euphemism for “nervous breakdown” or “secret tryst with girlfriend” or some kind of exotic sexual practice. I have no idea if any of those phrases even apply but, as conservative columnist Peggy Noonan famously wrote, it would “irresponsible” not to speculate.
The latest word on Tuesday from the hometown newspaper, the Columbia State, was that Sanford had “called to check in with his chief of staff this morning. It would be fair to say the governor was somewhat taken aback by all of the interest this trip has gotten.” He supposedly will return to his office on Wednesday.
It’s not as if Sanford had never done anything out of the ordinary. He once walked into the statehouse in Columbia carrying young pigs under each arm as a symbol of his opposition to pork-barrel spending. The piglets promptly defecated on the marble stairs – a mess that Sanford left behind for his aides to clean up. The actions of a right-wing whack job? Or simply an inconsiderate prick?
“Nobody’s ever accused our governor of being conventional,” said his spokesman, Joel Sawyer. No, and after the events of the weekend, I doubt Sanford will ever have to worry about that accusation again.
Sanford’s conduct reminds one of the exploits of the late Kirk Fordice, a crusty old bigot who was the Republican governor of Mississippi during the 1990s.
In 1999, as was widely reported at the time, Fordice purchased a $230,000 home outside Jackson, the state capital, but failed to invite his wife of 44 years, Pat Fordice, to visit it (the couple was having some marital problems at the time).
When Mrs. Fordice was out of the country on a trip to France, Gov. Fordice wrecked his state-owned vehicle while driving back to Jackson after spending the afternoon in a Memphis restaurant with an old high school girlfriend (who he later married after divorcing his first wife). Fordice, who was bruised and battered in the car accident, claimed he could not remember why he was in Memphis that day. (Fordice’s crashing of a state vehicle was an eerie foreshadowing of the vehicle accidents that have plagued the career of Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine.)
When a TV reporter tried to question Fordice about the accident, the governor said: ”Let me tell you something. You invade my privacy this way, six months from now I’ll whip your ass. You have no damn business playing these games.”
Now there was a man who understood the real meaning of “family values,” if by family you mean “the Sopranos.”
It almost goes without saying that Fordice, prior to the Memphis lunch with his girlfriend, had criticized President Bill Clinton over Clinton’s sexual indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky. Fordice also signed an executive order in 1996 banning recognition of same-sex marriages in Mississippi.
It’s one thing to mess around on your wife of 44 years and wreck a state-owned vehicle, but heaven forbid that two gay people would actually be allowed to marry.
Update: Sanford disclosed Wednesday morning that he actually flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina over that missing weekend. I’m sure the governor realizes now that the Applachian trail doesn’t go quite that far south.
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