Sanford Should Leave

Josh Marshall wrote yesterday that he thinks Gov. Mark Sanford should leave his wife for this woman in Argentina, who he calls his "soul mate."

But am I the only one who thinks that he appears to be deeply in love with this woman and should just go be with her?

No, Josh, you're not the only one thinking that. I agree. What seems increasingly unusual about this scandal is that Sanford is actually in love with her. He really went out of his way to see her. In just about every other political sex scandal I can think of, the other woman (this feels a tad perverse, but I am somewhat looking forward to a sex scandal involving a woman politician and another man - a milestone for equality!) was fairly close geographically and professionally. Except in the case of Eliot Spitzer, obviously, but at least those women were within a few hundred miles, on the same continent.

One great question, of course, is whether or not he can save his marriage. Josh doesn't think so.

The marriage seems clearly to be over. And if it wasn't on his first day back from Argentina, it's hard to conceive how it isn't now.

Jenny Sanford released a statement today opening the door to reconciliation. She's in a little bit of a bind. If she lets him go, she retains some dignity, but she also gets rejected for another woman. OTOH, if she keeps him, people will forever wonder about her motives for doing so, although she is apparently very successful on her own. Look at Hillary. She's stayed with Bill, but she's also paid a price for it - there are a number of people - primarily women - who just don't trust her because of that.

The best outcome for Jenny Sanford would probably be to divorce Sanford, extract a good settlement, and then go find another man. I'm sure she will not have much trouble in that regard.

Sanford is quickly losing support among Republicans in South Carolina. Jim DeMint, A Republican senator from South Carolina, is quoted at length in an article in The State, South Carolina's major newspaper, about Sanford. DeMint uses just about every rhetorical trick in the book to call on Sanford to resign without actually using the word "resign." It's a textbook example of spin.

“I have just encouraged him to do what’s best for the state and if we give him a little room, I know he will”

. . . . .

“A lot of us are talking to him behind the scenes in hopes that he’ll make the right decision about what needs to be done.”

. . . . .

“They say, when you are explaining, you are losing. And particularly on that subject, I think, he was,” the senator said. “I’m concerned of whether or not he is in a position that he can continue to lead the state.”

Protocol demands that a senator, in some respects senior to a governor, be the last person to demand a resignation like this, because as soon as he does, it's over. A senator is one of the only people besides the governor who represents the entire state, and therefore has his pulse on what everyone in the state is thinking. DeMint clearly wants Sanford gone, but he also doesn't want to be the one to pull the trigger. He would like Sanford to "do the right thing" and thereby retain a shred of dignity. DeMint is pretending to have some respect for Sanford, probably because he's known him for a while, and it's the decent thing to do. But Sanford is toast. The only question is, when does he realize it and act accordingly?

So why exactly do I think Sanford should give up his marriage, his kids, his career? He is apparently deeply in love with this woman, but he has spent years building this life - there might be some way to salvage part of it. She lives in a different country - all kinds of logistical problems immediately loom large. So why exactly should he give up everything for her?

Because he already has.

Mark Sanford and the future of newspapers

I haven't been blogging much over the last couple of weeks because I was working on some other stuff. So now I am going to catch up on some things I missed.


First up is Mark Sanford. The governor of South Carolina went out of town for a few days and, beyond anyone's expectations, came back to become much more famous (and infamous) than he was previously. Then, the next day, two very famous people died, and he was off the public's radar.


I don't want to condemn the man, or even comment on the blatant hypocrisy of a man who runs as a pro-family values candidate and then cheats on his wife. I do find it interesting that the public seems to have a finely nuanced understanding of these scandals. Some people are run out of office forthwith; see Spitzer, Eliot. Some survive, although they are damaged. See Clinton, Bill, and Vitter, David. Americans seem to be able to make fine distinctions based on the facts of the case. Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, but didn't break any laws in the process, and already had a reputation as a womanizer. Most people decided that it was a matter better left to he and Hillary. Spitzer, on the other hand, was a figure of rectitude, quite self-righteous, and broke laws. He didn't just get a blowjob; he crossed state lines and hooked up with a prostitute. The public understood that Spitzer was worse than Clinton.



What I found fascinating about the Sanford story were a couple of minor details about how it was covered. I first noticed it at TPM. The earliest post about it that I can find is from Monday, June 22nd. I remember thinking that it was odd that TPM was paying any attention to it - so the governor of South Carolina is incommunicado, so what? But then it started getting interesting very quickly. So that was a good catch on the part of TPM. I would not have known about it unless TPM caught it, because I have no reason to check in on South Carolina politics unless something very interesting is going on, and TPM found something very interesting very quickly.

What is more interesting is that this had great benefits for The State, South Carolina's major daily. They caught onto the story very early, and the traffic for their Website apparently just boomed. They've got a good timeline.

In the pre-Internet days, this would have been good for The State, but they could not have made that much money off of it, at least not right away. They would have sold more newspapers, but newspaper companies don't make a lot of money off of selling the physical copies of their newspaper; the price of the paper basically covers the cost of producing it. I delivered newspapers when I was a kid, and the paper didn't get the full price of the paper. First, subscriptions are discounted. Second, I took a cut of the price as my pay. So for a twenty-five cent newspaper delivered to someone's door, the paper might get only twelve cents.

Pre-Internet, The State would benefit by generating publicity for itself. It might win an award or two. And it might win over a few more subscribers. But suppose it sells 200,000 daily copies (that's a guess, but it's probably not far off). Management knows that this is a hot story, so they print an extra 20,000 copies, or 10% more, for three days. That extra 60,000 or so copies might slightly raise the average number of papers it sells, which might slightly increase the rates it charges advertisers. But there would not be an immediate, tangible benefit for the paper itself. I doubt they can charge the advertisers more for selling extra copies, although I suppose it's possible.

Today, however, the benefit is clear, immediate, and very tangible. Pre-Internet, The State would not have been able to sell extra papers in, say, New York or Washington, let alone another country, like, say, Argentina. Now, however, they generated a huge amount of traffic around the country, and around the world, almost instantaneously.

The best part for this newspaper is that that extra traffic on their Website generates extra revenue for very little extra cost. The primary cost is bandwidth, which is cheap and getting cheaper. Newspapers have one advantage on the Web, which is that they deliver valuable information primarily in the form of text, which takes up a minimal amount of bandwidth. But their ads are in the form of pictures, text, and video. Presumably they charge dramatically more for a video ad than for a simple picture. So the more bandwidth they use for delivering ads, the more money they make. They can control how much text and pictures they deliver, so they can control the amount of bandwidth they use in terms of content versus ads.

The other costs involved here - i.e., paying the reporters and editors, as well as other overhead - are already taken into account. There are no extra costs involved in covering this particular story. All they have to do is send a reporter to an airport that is fairly close, make a bunch of phone calls, and set up a video camera at the governor's press conference.

This whole episode bodes well for newspapers than can move quickly and cover a story like this. And there will always be stories like this. The State had emails between the governor and his lover. Why? Because someone had forwarded the emails to this particular newspaper. Why? Because if you have information that could potentially be very embarrassing to a political figure, you send it to a newspaper. Why? Because they know how to handle it, and they will give it the broadest possible exposure. The State did not release these emails because they could not be authenticated. Which sounds like they did their job - they checked out the information they had, performed some basic investigative journalism, and then made a responsible editorial decision. Someone also called the paper and gave them a heads up that he had been seen on a flight to Argentina, which is presumably why they had a reporter waiting for him at the airport when he came back.

All of this works to newspapers' strengths - they have reporters ready to move at a moment's notice, they have writers and editors who understand the situation and can provide context quickly. Newspapers have always been highly invested in finding malfeasance and scandal. What's different today is that they can make money off of breaking news much faster than they could before. Which means that they have that much more incentive to break that news themselves.