Down in South Carolina, the calls continue to build for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign his office. It’s a long fall for a man once considered a possible running mate for John McCain last year, and a serious presidential contender in 2012, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter—as much as anything, because Sanford just doesn’t seem to be able to let go and accept the full consequences of his actions. There are those in South Carolina who would excuse him because they don’t trust his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, and don’t want to see Lt. Gov. Bauer succeed Gov. Sanford; but if Gov. Sanford is that concerned about Lt. Gov. Bauer, he should have thought of that before having an affair. He has dishonored himself and disqualified himself from office; honor demands that he step down, regardless of whether he finds his successor satisfactory or not.
The truth is, at this point, Mark Sanford reminds me of Pete Rose (if not as scummy). Mike Schmidt made a telling comment recently about Rose:
If it were me, and I had lived a lie for 14 years, and I went up to tell the commissioner that I was sincerely sorry for what I’ve done to my family, to the sport, etc., I probably would be back in baseball now and in the Hall of Fame—because I would have been a tremendously remorseful individual. And I would have felt the burden of that the rest of my life, in everything that I did. And I would have, in my travels, been a totally different person.
My lifestyle would have changed. I would have felt an obligation to change and to become someone that the baseball world would once again learn to love after forgiving me. I would have been that guy. And I don’t think Pete has been.
So far, Gov. Sanford hasn’t been that guy either. Had he been willing to confess, step down, take it like a man, and actually take the time to put his life back together to where it really was what he had always presented it to be, his political life would probably already be in the recovery phase; after all, that sort of behavior is so rare among prominent politicians, it would have impressed a lot of people. But instead, he’s trying to hang onto everything he possibly can with both fists, and all he’s doing is making matters worse for himself in the long term. As a result, in the long term, Mark Sanford will matter most in this country as a cautionary tale of how you just never know with politicians, and how they can always let you down.
That doesn’t mean, though, that they always will; there are those who are honorable and faithful, people of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. The hard part is separating them out from the gifted liars who’ve internalized Groucho Marx’s crack that sincerity is the key, and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made; and the only way to make that separation is to let time, exposure and opposition do their work. The great difference between Barack Obama and John McCain last November wasn’t ideological, because Sen. McCain doesn’t have an ideology; the great difference was that, for good or ill, we knew who Sen. McCain is, because over the years it’s all been made very, very clear—but we really didn’t have a clue about Sen. Obama. That’s why there are such an astonishingly large number of people (for this early in his term) coming out and expressing regret for voting for the guy: he isn’t who they let themselves believe him to be.
Now, take this truth, and on the first anniversary of Sarah Palin’s elevation to the national stage, look back in the light of this truth at the battles she’s had to fight this past year. Look back at the PDSers and the plague of anklebiters, the oppo researchers parachuted into Wasilla and the media misrepresentations, and ask: What have they really done? Have they destroyed her? No; they’ve managed to convince a lot of people who would never have voted for her anyway, and they’ve planted concerns in the minds of a lot of potential supporters, but they haven’t done any damage she can’t undo, given time and exposure. What they havemanaged to do, though, is to establish pretty clearly that even given the combined efforts of thousands of motivated people backed by all the money they need for all the digging they want to do, there’s simply no real dirt to be dug up on Sarah Palin.
In other words, all they’ve managed by their efforts is to demonstrate that they can’t bring Gov. Palin down with the truth, because they’ve had to resort to lies, invented stories, misrepresentations, and unjustified charges. I don’t think most people who looked at her in an unbiased fashion had any doubts that she is who she presents herself to be, but at this point I think we can take that as proven—because if she weren’t, we’d have heard about it by now. (And oh boy, would we have heard about it.) If she had had any real skeletons in her closet, they’d have been out of the closet and line dancing on the front lawn of the Juneau statehouse long since. In short, no one needs to worry that Gov. Palin is going to pull a Sanford on us, or that she’s a fake, or that she will in any way prove to be not substantially what we thought she was, because the likes of Celtic Diva, Andree McLeod, David Axelrod and the ADN have done yeoman work for us in ruling out that possibility—not that that’s what they intended to do, but it’s what they’ve accomplished.
The intensity of Gov. Palin’s exposure and of the opposition she’s faced has made this clear in record time: she is, truly, one of the honorable and faithful people in our politics, one of those of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. For all the clouds she’s had to endure, that’s a remarkable silver lining.
(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)