Well, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is the latest high ranking Republican with presidential aspirations to admit to cheating on his wife, following in the esteemed footsteps of Nevada Senator John Ensign, who came clean last week.
What kills me isn’t the news that he was having an affair. That will haunt Sanford, his wife, and four sons for the rest of their lives.
What kills me is just how easy it was for Republicans and the punditocracy to blame Democrats and the media for stoking the story of the governor’s disappearance.
Why not? They’ve been doing it since Watergate. (“This is a political effort by the Washington Post, well conceived and coordinated, to discredit this Administration and individuals in it,” Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler said in an Executive Mansion press briefing in October, 1972.)
This is from The Washington Post’s The Fix this morning, prior to Sanford’s admission:
The whereabouts of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford over the past five days has stoked a bitter battle both within the Republican Party and between the two parties about whether it is a serious problem with implications for his expected 2012 presidential bid or simply an overblown media story that amounts to much ado about nothing.
Opinions varied widely.
South Carolina state Sen. Greg Ryberg (R) called the story the work of “well documented Republican political adversaries of the governor” while South Carolina Adjutant General Richard Eckstrom (R) said that a “mountain was being made out of a molehill.”
Stu Rothenberg, a well-known Washington-based political analyst and Fix friend, said the incident highlighted coverage “how little most people in the media know about South Carolina politics and how easy it was for the governor’s critics — and for ambitious state politicians — to manipulate the media.”
Others, including some Republicans, said that Sanford’s behavior was newsworthy and revealed the perils inherent in the national spotlight that shines on any 2012 presidential aspirant.”
“Every candidate thinking about running for president showed his wife’s quote [That Sanford had skipped Father's Day, and that she didn't know where he was.-ND] to their
spouse this morning and asked them to PLEASE never make such a statement . . . ever,” said Scott Reed, a Republican consultant who managed former Sen. Bob Dole’s (R-Kan.) 1996 presidential bid.A senior Republican consultant, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that the Sanford incident “won’t help him at all and will hurt him a bit in that it reinforces what most folks think of him, which is that he is so much of a maverick that he is in fact one strange dude.” …
So, which is it? Mountain or molehill?