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Thursday, June 25, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News Sanford: I got your stimulus, right here
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:03 PM
Now we know why Mark Sanford didn’t need any stimulus money. Ba-da-bing. (Thanks, Mike.) Seriously now, folks: Mark Sanford has been a terrible governor for South Carolina, one of the worst in a state with a long history of bad governors. Under Sanford, the state has gone from being an economic and educational backwater to its new status as, well, a complete shambles. Teachers and state employees have been thrown out of work because of Sanford’s tunnel-visioned, ideological response to federal stimulus money; already-bad schools have gotten worse as they languish without adequate funding; and now Gov. Cheapskate has been caught, as one writer to The State newspaper put it, “tak[ing] our money to go on a super long distance booty call.” It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
With all that said, however, people need to be consistent, and that includes columnists. I’ve written it before, but politicians’ affairs shouldn’t be the business of anyone but the politician and his/her family. That‘s what I thought about Clinton, Giuliani, Edwards, and the whole long laundry list of philandering pols we've seen. A good friend summed it up during the Lewinsky affair: “Clinton’s obviously a terrible husband, but I didn’t vote for him for husband, I voted for him for President, and I think he’s been a pretty good one.”
Where this view gets tricky is when the wandering politician du jour has made an issue of pledging allegiance to “family values,” claiming to be “a good Christian,” and condemning those who don’t adhere to that agenda. Sanford, remember, made political hay while in Congress by saying he voted to impeach Clinton because of the President’s immorality. Yesterday, Rudy Giuliani said, “These problems of romance, sexuality, etcetera, are not confined to Republicans or Democrats or independents,” and of course he’s right. The difference is that it’s usually only Republicans who dress themselves in the armor of sanctimonious morality before going out for a rousing match of bed wrestling.
So should Sanford resign the governorship over this affair? No. The affair itself is none of my, nor your, business. Period. He did, however, apparently spend taxpayer funds on flights to see his Argentinian paramour; that is the legitimate business of the state, and the legislature should censure him for it. That’s not how American politics works these days, however, and Sanford could be gone soon, the victim of his own sanctimony and wandering eye – which won’t really matter to the people of South Carolina, since he was never much of a governor to begin with.
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