“The odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart.” With these words South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford bid farewell to his Presidential aspirations, possibly to his marriage, and certainly to his political career. It was a strangely poetic confession by a hiker gone astray. “About a year ago it (his relationship with the woman known as Maria) sparked into something more than that,” he said. “And so oddly enough, I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina.”
A love so powerful as to induce a man to throw his life away is the stuff of great literature. Not being privy to his innermost thoughts, though, we don’t know if it was in fact such passion, or if, perhaps, it was a willfully self-destructive act of a man who knew he was not worthy of the highest office, who was not equal to the burdens of leadership.
Regardless, the fact remains, his political life is over. It is over because he failed as a husband, as a father, and as a governor. It is over mainly because he is a Republican. In America, Republicans are held to a much higher standard than Democrats. No doubt it is because Republicans claim to stand for values, responsibility and rectitude.
Democrats seem to face a much lower bar in the public’s eye. If you are a Democrat, your political career can survive the revelation that your latest boyfriend was running a male prostitution ring out of your townhouse. More than survive, you can rise to Chair the House Financial Services Committee. If you are a Democrat, your political career can survive, and this is putting the best interpretation on the act, abandoning a young woman to drown in a car you drove into a river. More than survive, you can rise to the status of senior statesman of your party. You can be the voice of morality for your party.
A Republican cannot survive such disgraces. This is not to say it isn’t fair, it is only to say that if you claim the moral high road, you had better stick to the pavement. Mark Sanford deserves the ignominy his actions will bring. He deserves the disgrace. He deserves to lose his political life. He deserves everything he will get, except, possibly, becoming the butt of a thousand jokes by hypocritic leftists.
There are many who maintain that, having been roundly defeated in the past two election cycles, the Republican Party has become irrelevant. This is not so. The principles which activate the Republican Party remain relevant, and will become increasingly more relevant as the Passion Play which is our government today continues to unfold. Republican office holders weren’t hurled out of office because of their principles. They were rejected precisely because they abandoned their principles. Their prime motive in Washington was the preservation of their power. They sold their honor for reelection. They spent money with disregard for economic principles and turned their back on the concept of fiscal propriety.
Republicans lost overwhelmingly not because they were Republicans, but because they were acting like Democrats. Now, the wisdom of replacing people acting like Democrats with Democrats, who are much more skilled at that behavior, was and will remain open to question. However, the people have spoken. They have sowed the wind, now they must reap the whirlwind.
The crucial lesson to be learned is not that the Republicans need to change. They need only return to the moral, fiscal and behavioral conservative standards by which their party has been historically defined. Republicans need to get back to embracing their principles, not embracing their mistresses.