AMERICA:When Mark Sanford vanished, he was reported to be hiking the Appalachian Trail. But he was in Buenos Aires meeting his lover, writes DENIS STAUNTON.
THE MYSTERY surrounding South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s five-day disappearance was resolved this week with the governor’s tearful admission that he has been having an affair in
Argentina. In a remarkable, 20-minute news conference, Sanford apologised to everyone he could think of, including his wife, his friends, the people of South Carolina and people of faith across the nation.
Democrats and much of the media leapt on Sanford’s admission as the latest in a string of revelations about the private lives of hypocritical Republicans. Sanford has long been tipped as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, as had Nevada senator John Ensign until he admitted this month to an affair with the wife of one of his staff.
Both Ensign and Sanford are Christian conservatives and both voted to impeach Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Other recent Republican transgressors include Louisiana senator David Vitter, who admitted to visiting prostitutes in Washington; former Idaho senator Larry Craig, who was arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s bathroom; and former Florida congressman Mark Foley, who resigned after he was caught sending lewd messages to teenage boys.
Democrats have had their scandals too, notably former presidential candidate John Edwards’s admission that he had an affair while his wife was battling cancer, and former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s exposure as the client of very expensive prostitutes.
Sanford’s story of mid-life infidelity is conventional by these standards but his public comments on the affair have been unusually candid and refreshingly un-spun.
He had met the woman more than eight years ago and their relationship began innocently, “as I suspect many of these things do”, with casual e-mail exchanges. “About a year ago, it sparked into something more than that,” he said. “I have seen her three times since then, during that whole sparking thing.”
When Sanford vanished late last week, his wife said she didn’t know where he was and his staff said they thought he was hiking along the Appalachian Trail. Governors have secret service protection and they are commanders in chief of their state National Guard but Sanford had flown to Buenos Aires alone and had told nobody how to contact him.
His wife had found out about the affair at the beginning of this year and threw him out of the house two weeks ago, telling him not to call until she told him so.
“We reached a point,” she said this week, “where I felt it was important to look my sons in the eyes and maintain my dignity, self-respect and my basic sense of right and wrong”.
Asked if he and his wife were separated, the governor wasn’t sure. “I don’t know how you want to define that,” he said. “I mean, I’m here and she’s there. I guess in a formal sense we’re not, but you know, what we’re – what we’re trying to do is work through something that, you know, we’ve been working through for a number of months now.”
Sanford might not have made his revelation this week if South Carolina’s leading daily, The State, had not shown him copies of e-mails exchanged between himself and the Argentinian woman the paper had obtained.
“You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty,” Sanford writes in one message.
“I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or 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 – but hey, that would be going into the sexual details.”
The e-mails suggest that the woman, who is a 43-year-old divorced mother of two grown-up sons, was happy to continue the affair. Sanford appears to have fallen madly in love but he knew it couldn’t last and he even encouraged the woman to date someone else.
“I am here because if you were to look at God’s laws, they are in every instance designed to protect people from themselves,” the governor said at his news conference.
“I think that that is the bottom line with God’s law – that it’s not a moral, rigid list of dos and don’ts just for the heck of dos and don’ts. It is indeed to protect us from ourselves.” Sanford has resigned as chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association but he is resisting calls to step down as governor of South Carolina. Nobody is talking any more about his future as a presidential candidate.
