Columbia, South Carolina THE PECULIARITIES of Republican Mark Sanford’s bid for governor of South Carolina are piling up. Sanford has no statewide campaign organization or ancillary groups like Veterans for Sanford. His wife Jenny is his campaign manager. When the state Republican chairman wanted to speak to him without his wife on the line, Sanford hung up. He doesn’t prepare for televised debates (and does poorly). Hit this summer with a two-month barrage of attack ads by Gov. Jim Hodges, his Democratic opponent, Sanford declined to rebut the charges, thus violating a cardinal rule of electoral politics. His appearances sometimes consist of a slide show (he travels with a slide projector). He once jotted down the text of a TV ad minutes before filming it. His speeches are seldom scripted. He rarely wears a tie. He backed John McCain in the 2000 presidential primary in what turned out to be a strong George W. Bush state. He now concedes the McCain endorsement was a “mistake.” There’s an upside to all this. Voters are captivated by Sanford’s unorthodox style. With no previous political experience, no following among Republicans, and zero name ID, he won a U.S. House seat in the coastal Charleston area in 1994. Sanford faced no opponent in his last two races, but nonetheless honored his promise to serve only three terms and retired in 2000. In the runoff last June for the GOP nomination for governor, he overwhelmed Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler, who was backed by most of the Bush forces in the state. Now he has an even or better chance of ousting Hodges. If he does, it’s likely to be one of the few Republican pickups of a governorship this year. And it would give the GOP full control of South Carolina — the governorship along with both houses of the legislature. Sanford, 42, is far and away the most interesting conservative running anywhere this year. His message is mildly radical: slow the growth of government, overhaul the bureaucracy, attract investment, and create jobs. He also favors a school voucher program similar to one enacted in Florida by Gov. Jeb Bush. But that’s not the radical part of Sanford’s agenda. This is: He wants to eliminate the state income tax (top rate 7 percent). No state has ever repealed its income tax (several states don’t have one). Sanford would not do it abruptly, but over 18 years. Still, he alone in the seven-candidate Republican field advocated it. All Hodges says is that he won’t raise taxes. In his slide show, Sanford presents a sophisticated analysis of how South Carolina has fallen behind in personal income — or what he calls a “wealth gap” of $5,800 a year between what people make, on average, nationally and what they earn in South Carolina. Unless the gap is closed, he says, young people will continue to migrate to other states. While income has lagged, Sanford says, the state government has metastasized, growing more rapidly than the federal government or nearby state governments. South Carolina has nearly twice as many state employees per capita as Florida. To lure investment and white collar jobs, Sanford would trim state government and reduce the tax (the top tax rate applies to incomes as low as $11,701) that supports it. Meanwhile, education spending has doubled in the past 25 years, but SAT scores in South Carolina remain stuck at 49th or 50th among the states. Sanford says this means money isn’t getting to teachers and classrooms. Education, however, is Hodges’s issue, not Sanford’s. It provides “a stronger playing field for Democrats than Republicans, even on your best day,” Sanford says. This is especially true in his case. For Sanford, education reform is but one part of his plan for restructuring state government. For Hodges, it’s his most powerful issue and one on which he has credibility. As House minority leader in the state legislature in 1995, Hodges pushed for extending kindergarten from a half to a full day. Republicans sneered that this was glorified day care, but Hodges’s proposal was wildly popular and he forced Republicans to back down. His bill passed. Now he is trying to bludgeon Sanford on the issue. Since Sanford won the GOP runoff on June 22, Hodges has aired an estimated $2 million worth of negative ads — many on education — that declare Sanford “wrong for South Carolina.” Sanford’s limp response prompted Brad Warthen, the editorial page editor of South Carolina’s most important newspaper, The State in Columbia, to urge Sanford to stop talking about parental choice and offer up a comprehensive plan for improving public schools. Sanford may do that, but what he won’t do is broadcast rebuttal ads on TV. The rule of thumb in politics is that a charge left unchallenged has a good chance of being believed by voters. Sanford doesn’t think so. His first TV spot of the general election campaign was a response, but hardly a point-by-point rebuttal. Referring to Hodges’s ads and speaking directly to the camera, he said: “I trust you will see those attacks for what they are. In the last four years, our economy has gotten worse and our schools still rank at the bottom. We don’t have to settle for that . . . help us bring a different approach to politics in Columbia.” The ad ends with a slogan: “Mark Sanford, a leader, not a politician.” Richard Quinn, a consultant for a Sanford opponent in the primary, says Sanford’s style and persona may make him immune to negative ads. In the runoff, Lt. Gov. Peeler ran a TV spot showing a Sanford lookalike stripping a soldier of his rifle, uniform, and wallet. The point was to portray Sanford as anti-military. The ad backfired. Earlier, Quinn had produced anti-Sanford ads for his candidate, Attorney General Charlie Condon. “We pounded him,” says Quinn. The result was zilch. “Mark is the most unorthodox politician I’ve ever bumped into,” Quinn says. “He’s unscripted. He likes to wing it. He doesn’t really have a consultant. There’s a real freshness about him. He campaigns on the notion that he’s a departure from politics as usual. He personifies that.” One source of his appeal is term limits. In 1994, his strongest opponents balked at self-imposed term limits. Sanford settled on three terms. “Six years seemed like an eternity,” he told me. By rejecting a career in Congress, he acquired what he calls “the rarest of all political commodities in Washington . . . independence.” In a short book he wrote in his final year in Washington, Sanford said, “If self-limits do nothing else, they afford a legislator the freedom to stand up for what he believes.” In his case, it meant championing sweeping Social Security reform, voting against highway spending, and rebelling against Republican leaders Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. By quitting after three terms, Sanford gained a reputation for keeping his word, a valuable asset for a politician. Back in Charleston in early 2001, Sanford was weighing job offers and thinking about running for Democratic senator Fritz Hollings’s seat in 2004 when he was visited by a Republican businessman from Spartanburg, John Rainey. Rainey knew Sanford only by reputation, but he felt Sanford was the only political figure who could disrupt the inertia in Columbia. “This is a person who, if you’re lucky, comes along once in a political lifetime,” Rainey says. He cited a passage in the New Testament, Luke 12: “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.” Sanford was intrigued. He consulted two former governors, Democrat Bob Kerrey of Nebraska and Republican senator George Allen of Virginia, who assured him governor was the office with the most leverage. After working up his ambitious economic and restructuring plan, Sanford announced. Outside Charleston, Sanford had no base of support. There’s no Sanford gang of allies in the legislature or GOP hierarchy. The Christian right, strong in the Greenville and Spartanburg area upstate, was leery of him. So were many Republicans who’d backed Bush over McCain in 2000, a contest whose traumatic effect on the GOP still lingers. But the McCain link didn’t hurt Sanford, except to unde
rscore his image as a different sort of politician. “I’m inherently distrustful of the inside of any political system,” he says. Five weeks after the runoff, Bush showed up for a Sanford fund-raiser that had been scheduled before the election, when Peeler, the Bush candidate, had been expected to win. “When you find a good one, you’ve got to help him, and you’ve found a good one in Mark Sanford,” the president said. Besides his personal attractiveness, Sanford has a geographical advantage against Hodges. The governor, wrote Lee Bandy of The State, “is boxed in from the north and south. The vote-rich Upstate is solid Republican territory. . . . The coast and Lowcountry are home to Sanford.” That leaves the middle of the state. All Sanford has to do is split the vote there and he wins. Not a bad spot to be in for a candidate who likes to wing it. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
