Remember when Mark Sanford was a serious possibility for the Republican vice presidential nomination? “I think [John McCain‘s] veep candidate should be, has to be and probably will be either Jim DeMint or Mark Sanford, and Mark’s my guy,” Ohio’s Ken Blackwell told the Washington Post in February 2008. That’s no embarrassment to Blackwell; a lot of people agreed with him back then.
When McCain went down to defeat, some placed Sanford, then the governor of South Carolina, in the upper tier of the 2012 presidential field. Then, of course, came the 2009 “hiking the Appalachian Trail” matter, revelations of Sanford’s affair with Maria Belen Chapur, and a very messy divorce from wife Jenny.
How could such scandal not kill a political career? For Sanford, survival meant hanging on to his governorship, followed by spending some time in the political wilderness, and seeing a chance for a comeback in a 2013 special election to the House. After winning a seat from the First District, Sanford is running unopposed for re-election this year.
But now Sanford has managed to make another mess of things. On Friday, he published a long post on his Facebook page slamming his ex-wife for her series of lawsuits against him. He grumbled about the money he had to give her in the divorce. He complained about child custody arrangements. He mused at great length about the nature of his suffering. He cited the Bible. And he announced that he was no longer engaged to marry Chapur. “No relationship can stand forever this tension of being forced to pick between the one you love and your own son or daughter, and for this reason Belen and I have decided to call off the engagement,” Sanford wrote.
No doubt many readers asked themselves: Why is he telling us this? Why is he making this public? One of those readers, apparently, was Chapur herself. “I learned it from the press today,” Chapur told the New York Times on Saturday.
Chapur confirmed that the couple had broken up, apparently at her behest, over her frustration with his refusal to set a marriage date. “We had a great time here, we were like in a honeymoon,” Chapur told the New York Times from Paris, where she and Sanford had just spent a week. “I thought that he might tell me, ‘O.K., let’s put a date, end of 2015.’ But that didn’t happen.”
Chapur said she told Sanford, “I don’t want to continue in the category of mistress.” His response, according to Chapur, was to ask for two more years of engagement, followed, perhaps, by marriage. With that, the engagement ended; Chapur told the Times she asked Sanford to make it public, but didn’t have any advance notice of the Facebook posting.
So now Sanford, after a hard-won partial recovery from the problems he made for himself in 2009, has created all sorts of new, and very public, problems for himself in 2014. And they are likely to continue. Sanford now has two media-savvy women mad at him; they are unlikely to remain silent.
Sanford was the butt of a million jokes during the hiking-the-Appalachian-trail affair. Now, even as he asks South Carolinians for their votes again, many will be mocking him for turning his romantic travails into a very public melodrama. And of course, Sanford has no one to blame but himself.
And there’s no telling where all this could lead politically. Yes, Sanford is running unopposed, meaning he is certain to win re-election. But what about the future? On Sunday morning, the blogger Allahpundit tweeted: “The Sanford saga can only end with Jenny primarying Mark and Maria endorsing her.” Given everything that has happened, why not?
