Effect
Gov. Mark Sanford is in love.
That’s the only conclusion I’ve come to after watching and rewatching the press conference he gave this past Wednesday upon returning from his mystery tour of Argentina:
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Pundits can argue all they want about the political implications of yet another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful crumbling under the weight of expectation (see Bobby Jindal, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, etc.). Religious leaders can pontificate about the sanctity of marriage, the need for forgiveness, and the importance of sending our prayers to Sanford’s wife and four sons. And prigs disguised as newspaper columnists can scream and shout about yet another politician who is guilty less of committing adultery than of divulging “too much information,” as if our tender eyes can’t possibly bear the sight of lightly erotic e-mails.
But those seem to me tiny issues when compared to the reality that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is in love – really in love – and that, in a remarkable public act of contrition/admission/confusion/desperation, he declared as much, for all the world to see.
Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t your typical post-affair mea culpa designed to save some horny politician’s career. Instead it was a cri de coeur from a man who had just made the decision to deny love for the sake of duty and tell the world about it, a man set loose from his moorings, rambling incoherently, reaching for words that weren’t there, crying out for, if not help, then at least a little empathy.
Of course, he’s not getting any. This is America, after all, land of sanctimony. Instead he’s receiving scorn and skepticism and moral condemnation – always, always moral condemnation.
And, to be perfectly honest, on most occasions I would be right up there with the rest of the vultures, heaping scorn. I would be luxuriating in the sight of a hypocritical, self-important, sanctimonious windbag getting his comeuppance for all those times he tried to crush other men of weakness from atop his own personal Mount Sinai (see Sanford’s role in the Clinton impeachment nonsense). But, I just can’t summon any ill will toward Sanford today. I hate everything he stands for, disagree with everything he fights for, and loathe those pompous claims about being a “man of faith,” made while he was secretly slobbering all over the seventh commandment in Buenos Aires. But I just can’t seem to make myself indignant. And the reason is simple: How can you attack a guy who just publicly sacrificed love in the name of honor or duty or family or religion or confusion over all of the above? That seems to me the very definition of kicking a man when he’s down.
Check out the video tape. This is a Southern Republican governor admitting to the whole world that he had spent the last five days crying in Argentina. That admission alone is political suicide: Americans can tolerate their politicians showing emotion but not on foreign soil.
No, I can’t feel hate. All I can manage is fascination. And pity. A whole lot of pity. And a little bit of awe at what we’ve just witnessed.
Indeed, Wednesday’s press conference was a remarkable piece of political theater because it wasn’t theatrical at all; it was just an unscripted display of human desperation. Sanford wasn’t there to renounce and deny his mistress; he was there to proclaim his love, in all its jumbled, self-destructive, incoherent beauty. It wasn’t just guilt that drove him to that microphone, but a need for human compassion and understanding, a desperate cry for help from a man who has convinced himself, though years of religious indoctrination, that love – even true love – outside the bounds of wedlock is a sin. This past Wednesday, we got to watch a man’s religious convictions crash headlong into his human desires on national TV.
Listen to Sanford at the 14:17 mark, when he says, “She lives thousands of miles away.” Listen to the crack in his voice. Listen to him mitigating his speech with ungainly phrases like “zones of protectiveness.” If that sounds to you like a man cynically manipulating his way back into the public’s good graces after cynically manipulating a woman into bed simply for the sake of getting himself off, then you’re more jaded than I am.
I watch that footage, I listen to Sanford calling his mistress a “dear, dear friend” and talk about their “remarkable friendship” that “sparked into something more than that,” and what I hear is a man thinking to himself, “All I want to do is leave this press conference, resign the governorship, jump on a plane, and get back into the loving arms of my girl.” Like Mark Antony, he’d be willing to sacrifice the whole world for this woman … if he could only find the guts to do it.
Problem is, Sanford doesn’t appear to have any guts, and it looks like he’s going to sacrifice the whole world and sacrifice the love he was sacrificing that world for and, as a consequence, lose both and get neither. What kind of thinking is that, Governor? You’ve come this far; you might as well go all the way. True, you mistreated your wife and deceived your kids and maybe even broke your oath to the people of South Carolina, but turning back now out of some deluded sense of religious obligation means you did all that sinning for nothing. It’s a rare thing to find true love in this world. Are you really going to throw it away out of guilt?
Remember, Guv, God spits out the lukewarm.
Pray for Gov. Sanford, religious pundits tell us. But he doesn’t need our prayers. On the contrary, we should all be so lucky as to find true love in South America. And despite my cynicism and my political prejudices, the simple fact is, my heart’s with the guy. Because anyone who’s ever been in love knows it makes you do crazy, self-destructive, embarrassing things.
And that press conference was so crazy, so self-destructive, so embarrassing, it could only have been orchestrated by a man in love.
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One Comment
I’m with you on this one, Josh. I can’t read microexpressions, but I bet if I could, I could tell you that, scientifically speaking, the man’s in love. I detected in him some contempt for the press, too.
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