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Mark Sanford's sin doesn't mean ruin for Republicans
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
06/25/09 2:02 PM EDT
The point is being made that the Republican party is in terrible trouble because two Republican presidential candidates have been felled in two weeks by admissions of adultery.
Well, yes, to a point.
Mark Sanford had the potential to be an interesting presidential candidate, though given his aversion to standard political tactics most likely not a successful one. John Ensign on the other hand was never more than a very unlikely candidate. He is not hugely articulate, he has no particular ties to any important constituency in Republican presidential politics, he has not sponsored major legislation. He may have been traveling to Iowa, but it seems almost certain that his presidential candidacy was never going anywhere.
I don’t think that this means the Republican party is necessarily in trouble—there will surely be multiple candidates for its presidential nomination in 2012—any more than the Democratic party is or has been in trouble because in the last two years two Democratic presidential candidates felled by admissions of adultery. John Edwards, number two in the Democratic race in 2004 and the Democratic vice presidential nominee that year, apparently fathered a child during the 2008 presidential cycle and he and his cancer-stricken wife strived to cover that up. And Eliot Spitzer, though he never declared himself a presidential candidate, undoubtedly saw one in the mirror when he got up every morning, even on his ill-fated overnight at the Mayflower Hotel.
Spitzer of course could not run in 2008; he had just been elected in 2006, and his fellow New Yorker Hillary Clinton was already running. But he seemed certain to be reelected in 2010, and as the governor of New York was inevitably an important political figure. In the last century or so at least some New York governors have run for president (Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller) and the last two governors (Mario Cuomo and George Pataki) at least thought about doing so. The absence of Edwards and Spitzer from future Democratic nomination contests does not mean ruin for the Democratic party. The absence of Sanford and Ensign from future Republican nomination contests does not mean ruin for the Republican party.
Bill Clinton, always a shrewd political analyst, understood the new rules. At a 1991 press breakfast he and his wife Hillary Clinton let it be known that they had had problems in the past but that their marriage was not solid. In other words, he had strayed in the past, but wouldn’t do so any more. We saw how long that lasted.
In Mark Sanford’s case, however, he seems to have violated the rule because he was in love; perhaps that was the case with John Ensign and John Edwards as well, though not in the case of Eliot Spitzer. But the rule is there for all to see.
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