Political sex scandals are just about all
the same.
Man cheats on wife. Man gets caught. Man makes tight-lipped statement at a news conference, suffocated with awkwardness. Wife looks jaded and dead inside. Kids probably take up drugs shortly afterward.
It's routine stuff, and we're left to file the adulterers away as pigheaded fellows who assumed their power excused them from the rules - of governance and of matrimony.
That's always the story, except in the case of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, America's oldest living teenager.
Last week, Sanford admitted to the world that his unexplained absence was not due to "hiking the Appalachian Trail," as he had told his staff, but was instead filled by a trip to Argentina and some sordid business with a woman named Maria. A rising star in the Republican Party, Sanford dashed his presidential aspirations and, perhaps more importantly, introduced "hiking the Appalachian Trail" as a fantastic euphemism for cheating on your wife.
After watching the rambling, bleary-eyed news conference that followed, I knew things were different with Sanford. We've seen our fair share of coital mea culpas in the past decade or so: former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, former South Carolina Sen. John Edwards and, of course, former President Bill Clinton. But those men, when facing an angry public, were quick to assert that they had made a lapse in judgment, that they loved their wives and their gods and their dignity, and were really, really sorry.
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Not the case for Sanford, who phrased his apology with words normally reserved for lovelorn fans of The Cure. How did he describe his relationship with Maria? "From a heart level, there was something real," he said in the news conference. And why'd he break it off? Well, "based on where I was in life, based on where she was in life, and places I couldn't go and she couldn't go." And how does he look back on it? "I can die knowing I met my soul mate."
Hardly the words of a shrewd spin doctor.
When the other shoe dropped on Kilpatrick, Detroiters wanted him in jail. When I read all this about Sanford, I wanted to give him a hug and a Morrissey album.
Even his adulterous correspondence is more Browning than de Sade. E-mails, text messages and phone transcripts obtained by the press are often great sources of lurid hilarity (see: Foley, Mark). But Sanford's e-mails read like confiscated love notes in 10th-grade honors English. "In the meantime, please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head, my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul," he wrote to Maria in an e-mail dated July 10, 2008.
All of this was, predictably, not well-received by the public or Sanford's Republican colleagues. He has been called to resign and has already stepped down from his post as head of the Republican Governors Association. TV commentators have questioned his sanity because, apparently, a man expressing his love for a woman is a sign of mental instability. It would be saner, I suppose, if he kept up the quasi-misogynist tradition of painting the other woman as Salomé, as an evil temptress who tricked a noble king.
We can all agree that, generally, cheating on your wife is bad. Lying to your staff and constituents - also bad. But when we judge Sanford, let's not put his actions in the context of other marriages, of other governors or of other adults, even. This is not a crass man, deluded after years in power, with a marriage of convenience and a hulking ego. This is an emotionally fragile adolescent, a guy who was once respected and happily married, but who went to another country and met a woman - the type of woman he didn't know existed - and then fell wholly, bizarrely in love with her. He finally got the nerve to talk to the pretty girl in homeroom, only to remember that he was going to prom with somebody else.
He has neither Clinton's prodigious libido, Edwards' inflated sense of self-worth nor Eliot Spitzer's emotional detachment. Instead, he's got a 16-year-old's understanding of love and commitment, and, try as I may, I just can't demonize him for that.
