Wednesday, Sep. 02, 2009

Scoppe: Arrogant defiance won’t get Mark Sanford, or our state, anywhere

I WAS OFF work last week, so I watched from afar the governor’s second unraveling. Other people have been saying for some time that they don’t know the Mark Sanford who would cheat on his wife, abandon his responsibilities and (especially) secretly take advantage of the perks — legal and otherwise — of office.

The man I don’t know is the one who has suddenly become politically stupid and breathtakingly arrogant, at the very moment he is least able to get away with that.

When Mr. Sanford was forced to admit to his yearlong affair with Maria Belen Chapur, he blunted a good deal of the outrage with his humble, blame-accepting apology. Whether it was sincere or not, it was smart politics.

When critics questioned the taxpayer-funded 2008 trip to Argentina during which his friendship with Ms. Chapur became sexual, he voluntarily repaid the state for the cost of the trip. It was unnecessary from a legal standpoint, but it was smart politics — and consistent with the image he had so carefully cultivated as a man who would always go the extra mile to be above political reproach.

His melt-down “soul mate” interview came across more as pathetic, and stomach-turning, than as a slap in the face to the public. And while tedious, his apology tour at least seemed to reflect genuine humility, which makes it difficult for hearers to hold a grudge.

But as the conversation has turned away from his sex life and back to more clearly legitimate topics of public interest, a startling metamorphosis has occurred.

Instead of taking the above-reproach approach of repaying the state — or even apologizing — for using state aircraft for personal trips and taking expensive overseas flights while demanding that everybody else in government double up, he’s pointing fingers, shifting blame, whining that he’s the victim. Last week, he flew to Greenville to stand outside David Thomas’ law office and denounce the senator’s “investigation” into those flights as political — which of course it is but which is entirely beside the point. He put his staff to work digging up data to show that his predecessors traveled more at taxpayer expense than he has. He became increasingly belligerent in dismissing reporters’ questions about his travel.

(At one of his media unavailabilities, the governor asked reporters to “really look at: What are the real facts in this case? What is the larger context in this case?” Those are legitimate requests. But they are two very different requests. The facts are that his travel has on several occasions flown in the face of state ethics law. The larger context is that he might have been more frugal with tax dollars than his predecessors. I have to say “might” because so much of what we have come to believe about Mark Sanford has turned out to be illusion.)

When he finally agreed to lift the veil of secrecy from the Ethics Commission’s investigations into his travel, he broke his pledge to work with the Legislature rather than making it a whipping boy — using this opportunity to demand that lawmakers lift all secrecy provisions from their own ethics investigations.

Though by itself none of the revelations about Mr. Sanford’s travel arrangements merits more than a slap on the wrist from the Ethics Commission, without any hint of repentance, their cumulative effect at some point becomes overwhelming. And though he might be right that most people have moved on — though I’m not sure about that — in a state where the Legislature calls all the shots, where a governor’s agenda isn’t diddly-squat unless legislators are with him, what’s most important is whether the Legislature has moved on. Clearly, it has not.

I don’t know whether Mr. Sanford will ever be able to change the topic. But I do know that won’t even be a possibility until he mans up enough to start acknowledging his sins against our state.

As he makes the rounds of civic clubs and business and political groups, Mr. Sanford is apologizing for the wrong thing — or at least not apologizing for the most important thing. Instead of continuing to make what is by now the easy apology, he needs to apologize for using the state plane to fly him back to work from vacation, violating the spirit and perhaps the letter of state ethics laws. He needs to apologize for flying around in friends’ planes for what are clearly political and governmental events and not reporting those “gifts,” as state law requires. He needs to apologize for hopping the state plane to go make those attacks that are designed for the sole purpose of salvaging what he can of his political hide — and his job. He needs to apologize for spending six and a half years going to elaborate lengths to make us believe that he’s going to ridiculous lengths to pinch state pennies, when in fact he is at least sometimes doing the opposite.

I can’t guarantee that the right sort of apologies will calm down the Legislature, but short of resigning, that’s the only hope I can see of avoiding an impeachment battle that will, yet again, distract our state from the deepening problems that we simply cannot continue to avoid.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.

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