Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s thoughtful ‘Editor’s Cut’ piece “Time to End False Bipartisanship” in The Nation is an important contribution to shaping the debate on health care reform. As America’s most venerable progressive magazine, The Nation is read by many of America’s tough-minded left of center social critics, a vitally-important constituency for securing meaningful health care reform. In her editorial, Vanden Heuval provides what may be the best case yet made for urging left Dems to support a health reform plan anchored in a public option, as a step toward a universal, single-payer system down the road:

…Like 59% of the Americans surveyed in January 2009 by CBS News and the New York Times, I would prefer, as would my colleagues at The Nation, to see Congress respond to this country’s healthcare crisis by scrapping a failed-for-profit system and replacing it with a comprehensive national health insurance program.
But for now, the calculus of political viability has taken single-payer off the table. That doesn’t mean we cease fighting to get it back on –but it probably means we need to balance our short and long-term goals. Let’s assume some compromise in our political system is inevitable. The hard question is whether the compromise opens the door to greater progress or forecloses opportunity. A weak public plan will make it harder to get healthcare expenses under control while extending care to all. A weak plan may discredit healthcare reform for a generation. Real reform will cement strong attachment to the party which has shown it can pass legislation truly improving the condition of people’s lives…

Vanden Heuvel opposes coddling centrist Dems, who are backing away from the public option and warns of the need to get them to “pay more attention to the broad majority favoring a strong public option than to the wads of dough lavished on them by big Pharma and insurance lobbyists.” She is clear also that the acceptable compromise does not include pandering to Republicans who oppose even a public option:

It’s time to part ways with obstructionist Republicans and pass a strong healthcare bill with a majority vote, which is possible if efforts cease to get a handful of Republicans to cross over. Redefining bipartisanship at a time when the GOP has become a male, pale and stale party committed to deficit demagoguery and fearmongering is the common sense and, I’d even argue, pragmatic course. Instead of wasting time on recalcitrant GOP holdouts, do what Drew Westen, author of the terrific book “The Political Brain,” advises to pass meaningful healthcare change: “Focus on principles, tell compelling stories, move people emotionally and send clear messages.”

Many liberal Democrats are still fiercely supportive of single-payer reform as the best possible alternative. But Vanden Heuvel’s editorial is a signal that the broad outlines of health care reform being advocated by the Obama Administration and other progressive Democrats provide a credible stepping stone toward an all-inclusive, single payer system. As she asks “…With a President with high approval ratings and an historically unpopular GOP–if this isn’t a time to pass sweeping reform with a strong public plan, then when is?”

Today’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano is going to get cited, distorted and taken out of context massively in the next few weeks, so it’s probably a good idea to make an effort to actually understand it.
As you may know, the case involved a promotion test for firefighers in New Haven, Connecticut in which all the white and one Hispanic) applicants scored better than all the African-Americans. The city tossed out the tests figuring that promotions based on it would fall prey to the “disparate impact” standard for employment discrimination suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. White firefighters sued on both statutory and constitutional grounds, lost at the trial court level on a motion for summary judgment, which was upheld by Judge Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supremes narrowly reversed this decision on statutory but not constitutional grounds, with the usual conservative coalition of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thompson in the majority, with the usual Kennedy opinion.
Here’s how Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog characterizes Kennedy’ s treatment of the Second Circuit’s ruling:

I am struck by the extent to which the majority opinion largely treats the court of appeals’ ruling as a non-event. To the contrary, Justice Kennedy almost seemingly goes out of his way not to criticize the decision below, notwithstanding that the Supreme Court takes a dramatically different view of the legal question. The Court indicates that the state of the law before today’s ruling was “a difficult inquiry,” and that its “holding today clarifies how Title VII applies.” It rejects the plaintiffs’ outright attack on the Second Circuit’s decision as “overly simplistic and too restrictive.”

That figures, since Sotomayor and company were applying limited case precedents in a very plausible way–plausible, indeed to the four Supreme Court dissenters from today’s decision, including the Justice Sotomayor has been appointed to replace, David Souter. So it’s no big deal in terms of Sotomayor’s confirmation, right?
Well, you’d think so, but that’s certainly not how conservative activists are going to play it. Michelle Malkin’s headline tells you exactly how they will play it: “Racism rejected: SCOTUS reverses Sotomayor in firefighters case .”
As it happens, new data from ABC/Washington Post on the Sotomayor nomination came out just yesterday, showing solid majority support for her confirmation. You better believe that the groups already determined to mine the confirmation fight for fun and profit will use a cartoon version of today’s decision to try to turn things around.

Gabriel Schoenfeld’s article in today’s Wall St. Journal, “What If Obama Did Want to Help Iran’s Democrats?” argues that the Obama Administration may be crippling its Iran policy by not recognizing the efficacy of “covert political action.” As Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a resident scholar at Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute explains Obama’s problem:

In a better world, toppling this vicious regime and altering the tide of history would be a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy. Yet even if President Obama miraculously came to that conclusion, how could he realize such an objective? This is a useful question to ask because it reveals how much the United States has disarmed itself in the vital realm of intelligence.
…Harsh criticism of such operations — beginning in the 1970s when all the CIA’s secrets spilled out — is what prompted the U.S. to dismantle its capabilities in covert political action. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, legions of agency critics said, was both immoral and illegal.
As a matter of law, the critics are right. Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it. This is what the Soviet Union did in Italy, and it is what Iran, by organizing terrorist structures in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, has been doing intensively for 30 years.

Schoenfeld’s article, subtitled “The CIA is no longer in the business of influencing politics abroad,” credits CIA funding of centrist political parties in Italy during the 1950’s as an effective strategy to counter the rapid growth of Italy’s Communist Party, thereby helping Italy to remain a “stable democracy today.” But Shoenfeld’s characterization of Italy’s Communist Party as undemocratic is unfair, since they did participate in elections.
If covert ops have any legitimacy, they should be narrowly focused on supporting pro-democratic, not exclusively “centrist”, forces in dictatorships and in nations at risk of becomming dictatorships. Using U.S. resources to oppose democratically-elected governments, as we did in Chile, or to influence elections in other nations, is immoral, unwise and can easily backfire.
But if Schoenfeld is right that U.S. support of centrist political parties was the pivotal element in achieving our foreign policy objectives in Italy, however misguided, without expensive military action, then perhaps there is an instructive strategic lesson for our policy toward Iran.
The debate over U.S. policy toward Iran is usually cast in terms of military vs. diplomatic action, with very little discussion about the possibilities of covert political operations, or even expanding our propaganda outreach in Iran. The latter wouldn’t be hard since our current effort is so weak. The current issue of The New Yorker for example, features an eyewitness report on the June 15th protest against the stolen election, in which the author notes,

…the government tries to jam all foreign TV stations—in particular, the BBC’s Persian-language channel. This channel, beaming images and reports sent by normal Iranian citizens back into the country, has been hugely influential in spreading news of the protests to Iranians who would otherwise have relied on state television or the inferior American-based Persian-language channels.

Peruse recent public opinion polls on the topic of U.S. policy toward Iran going back 5 years or more, and you won’t find any mention of enhancing intelligence, propaganda or covert ops as a choice in polling questions. (A CBS News/New York Times poll conducted 9/21-24, 2008 indicates the public favored “diplomacy now” over “military action now” in Iraq by a margin of 61 to 10 percent)
Perhaps the pollsters assume the public has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude regarding covert ops, or they include it conceptually as an intelligence function under the rubric of “diplomacy.” But if the U.S. becomes more vigorously engaged in the struggle to win hearts and minds as a third option, it could prove to be a highly effective use of our resources in achieving foreign policy objectives in trouble spots like Iran. (More on this topic here)
According to Schoenfeld, the U.S. is not getting much credit for our disengagement from Iranian politics:

The great irony in all this is that even as the U.S. seeks to claim the moral high ground by not “meddling” — to use Mr. Obama’s term — we and our allies are getting blamed all the same. “There are riots and attacks in the streets that are orchestrated from the outside in a bid to destabilize the country’s Islamic regime,” says Sheikh Naim Qassem, a ranking figure of Hezbollah, Iran’s obedient instrument in Lebanon.

A fair point, Perhaps some thoughtful “meddling,” if not by the CIA, then by other U.S. agencies concerned with foreign policy could help encourage a stable democracy in Iran. Diplomacy is almost always a better choice than military action. But strengthening our on-the-ground intelligence in Iran and in other Arab nations and using it to promote the spread of democracy, instead of U.S. military dominance, should become a leading strategic objective.

Maybe it’s the years I spent working on federal-state relations, but it’s still amazing to me how little attention is paid in Washington to the involvement of states and localities in implementing big national policies–or the impact of federal decisions on state and local operations, services and finances. That’s particularly maddening right now, when you have states on the brink of fiscal insolvency, and policy areas–particularly health care and environmental protection–where the states already play such an integral role.
Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration feels likewise, so we collaborated on an article that’s in the New York Times’ Economix blog this morning. We were especially motivated by the general ignorance of intergovernmental relations exhibited in Congress and the media during the economic stimulus debate, and also by the implications of the fiscal disaster underway in California.
Our prescription was largely to start paying attention:

Americans don’t need another gauzy ideological debate over federalism and states’ rights. But we do need to pay greater attention to realities of federalism when setting national policy.
Thus, federal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.
We should also scrutinize the division of roles and resources across different levels of government. The road maps of 1933 (when the first New Deal was put in place) or 1965 (when Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law) may no longer apply. Some tasks, such as long-term care, are now so costly that they require greater federal resources. Others, like regional planning, require greater state and local authority.
The likely bailout of California provides unwelcome opportunities to realign these competing roles. It provides a timely reminder: Americans live in towns, cities, counties, and states, not just the United States of America.

The “national budget” is something I’ve been occasionally talking about for, oh, at least a quarter century. But it’s not like the system has gotten any better the in interim, so there’s no time like the present to try again.

Okay, just one more unavoidable reference to Mark Sanford unless he makes some real news by resigning as governor or getting impeached. In his poignant press conference on Wednesday, he made a cryptic reference to “working through” his infidelity issues on “C Street” in Washington.
This was quickly deciphered by Dan Gilgoff of US News and others as a reference to the Capitol Hill townhouse owned by a shadowy fundamentalist group variously called “The Family” and “The Fellowship,” which sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast and a variety of other religious events and services aimed at elite political and business leaders. Turns out that the other would-be-presidential-candidate-with-an-adultery-scandal, Sen. John Ensign, lives at “C Street” when he’s in DC, whose proprietors knew about and tried to help him manage his problem, as Manuel Roig-Franzia explains in today’s Washington Post:

The house pulsed with backstage intrigue, in the days and months before the Sanford and Ensign scandals — dubbed “two lightning strikes” by a high-ranking congressional source. First, at least one resident learned of both the Sanford and Ensign affairs and tried to talk each politician into ending his philandering, a source close to the congressman said. Then the house drama escalated. It was then that Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress, endured an emotional meeting with Sen. Tom Coburn, who lives there, according to the source. The topic was forgiveness.
“He was trying to be a peacemaker,” the source said of Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

“Peacemaker” is one term for it; “damage controller” is another.
These incidents cast some unwelcome light on “The Family,” a secretive group (sort of an evangelical version of the conservative Catholic elite group Opus Dei, though much less focused on conversions) whose vast array of activities were exposed last year in a sensational book by Jeff Sharlet. By sheer coincidence, I’ve just started reading Sharlet’s book, and it’s pretty disturbing to me on both religious and political grounds.
That intrepid chronicler of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner of The American Prospect, summarized Sharlet’s take on “The Family” last year in an article that also offered an interview with the author:

The Family exposes the inner workings of an elite and secretive association of politicos (The Family boasts a bipartisan but mostly Republican roster of members, including Sens. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, and Mark Pryer, an Arkansas Democrat) and business executives (such as the CEOs of Continental Oil and the defense contractor Raytheon) who have exploited their uber-masculine, uber-capitalist version of Christianity to serve political and profit-making goals, from union-busting here at home to imperialist adventures abroad.

But I’m not sure even Sharlet knew that The Family’s services included counseling and public-relations-damage-control for governors and senators caught up in adulterous affairs. I guess when you are trying to impose what you think to be the Will of God from the top down, you spare no expense or trouble in managing your investments.

Democracy Corps is out with a new analysis of public opinion on health care reform, based on extensive polling and focus group work. Much of it reflects the advice that TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg has been offering on how to succeed where President Clinton failed in securing universal health coverage.
But the new DCorps memo provides an interesting focus on the “swing vote” for health care reform:

Proponents and opponents of reform will be battling for the 35 percent of the electorate
who are not satisfied with the health insurance system but satisfied with their personal insurance.
Conservatives and some in the media think these voters are not serious about change, but that
misreads them, as we realize from our focus groups last week. They are “satisfied” with their
choice of doctors, that their employer is picking up most of the cost and that they may have
better insurance than others. But, they are not happy about having traded off wages or gotten
locked into a job because of health care or about the fate of a child with a chronic ailment who
may not be able to get insurance in the future. So, they are nervous about change, but they want
it.

The DCorps team goes on to identify five key strategies for appealing to these key voters:
1. Voters need to hear clearly what changes health care reform will bring.
2. Build a narrative around taking power away from the insurance companies and giving it
to people.
3. The president and reform advocates have to explain concretely the changes that will mean
lower costs.
4. Show all voters and seniors that there are benefits for them, including prescription drugs.
5. All of these points should be made with the dominant framework that continuing the status
quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.
This analysis leads to a overarching narrative that DCorps recommends:

Continuing the status quo in health care is not acceptable and not sustainable. Keeping the status quo means the insurance companies are still in charge, jacking up rates and denying coverage. It means more people losing insurance or enslaved to their job, prices skyrocketing for families and businesses and our companies less
competitive. We need change so that people no longer lose coverage or get dropped for a pre-existing condition, and see lower costs.

“Safe change” is always a tricky message to convey, even when people are open to or eager for change. But if DCorps is right, then it will be the key to navigating health care reform through many obstacles.

As a follow-on to Michael Cohen’s post late yesterday, it’s worth noting that those who put a lot of emphasis on recent polling showing a surge of concern about budget deficits need to address some problems with such polling. At TNR, Linda Hirshman draws attention to an interesting new analysis from Pew that obtains notably different results from other recent polls on the importance of deficits to the public, by asking much more straightforward questions:

Instead of offering the public an elaborate scenario in which they were asked to probe their innermost feelings and choose a position that accords with their “point of view” about what should worry the government more, as NBC did, Pew asked: “If you were setting the priorities for the government these days, would you set a higher priority on ‘spending more to help the economy recover’ or ‘reducing the budget deficit'” (rotating the choices). Forty-eight percent of those questioned put a higher priority on spending more to help the economy recover, while 46 percent chose reducing the deficit.

Spending and deficits have long been an area where the precise wording of poll questions can produce widely varying results, as James Vega demonstrated in a May post on Resurgent Republic’s message polling. And this has been particularly true of polling about such abstractions as “stimulating the economy,” which isn’t nearly as popular as specific categories of public investment or spending such as health care or education.
These are all factors for Democrats to seriously consider before urging a major pullback on the Obama domestic agenda on grounds that the public wants deficit reduction first.

Note: This is a guest post from Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” We welcome it as part of a continuing effort to enlist diverse voices in discussions of Democratic strategy.
Last week Ed highlighted a post over at TNR by William Galston raising a number of red flags about public opinion and growing doubts about the President’s domestic agenda. One of the points Galston made jumped out at me – and has been further crystallized by Mark Sanford’s painful press conference yesterday:

The best thing Democrats have going for them right now is the public’s near-total withdrawal of confidence from the Republican Party, which now “enjoys” its lowest rating ever recorded in the NYT/CBS survey–a finding that Pew confirms.

Yet even with this good news and additionally positive approval ratings for President Obama, Galston offered some rather timid recommendations for Democrats, arguing that they need to focus on “major legislative initiatives . . . that the public can accept” and to make a priority “their ability to persuade the public that something real is being done to rein in spending and debt.”
But I wonder if Bill is making this a bit too complicated and overemphasizing temporary concerns over spending, the deficit and traditional voter suspicion toward government. Right now it seems the most important two factors in public opinion are that the country trusts Barack Obama to do the right thing and they don’t trust Republicans . . . at all.
Right on cue, this week’s new poll from the Washington Post provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. At the same time that confidence in the President’s stimulus package is softening his approval ratings remains sky high – at 65%. In addition, Obama is far more trusted that his Republican opponents on a host of issues.
Obama maintains leverage because of the continuing weakness of his opposition. The survey found the favorability ratings of congressional Republicans at their lowest point in more than a decade. Obama also has significant advantages over GOP lawmakers in terms of public trust on dealing with the economy, health care, the deficit and the threat of terrorism, despite broad-based Republican criticism of his early actions on these fronts.
The GOP’s approval rating is at 36% with disapproval at 56% and only 22 percent self-identify as Republicans. After watching Mark Sanford yesterday and considering the public spectacle of another prominent Republican publicly confessing private infidelity, it’s hard to imagine that these numbers are going to see much bump in the near future.
Even on the deficit, an issue that both Republicans and Democrats have trumpeted as being of great concern, the President has a twenty-point advantage over the GOP. Recent polls on health care reform show strong support for a so-called public option even though the idea has near unanimous opposition from Republicans. While it can be dangerous to draw too overly broad conclusion from a handful of polls, it’s hard to see any evidence at all that GOP attacks on the President are having much of an impact. In fact, outside their narrow base of supporters, Republicans seem to have almost no credibility, notwithstanding Jim Vandehei and Jonathan Martin’s threadbare effort to find a sliver of hope for the GOP.
The President – even in the face of worsening economic news – has not only enormous credibility, but is widely trusted. Again, according the Post, a majority of voters see the President as someone “”who will be careful with the public’s money” rather than a tax-and-spend Democrat. Quite simply, with strong majorities in the House and Senate, it’s been a long time since the country has seen a political leader with this type of political capital (whatever George Bush might have said in 2005).
So the time has come to use it. Galston’s advice is an argument for playing defense rather than the right course of action for Democrats: going on the offensive. While Obama obviously should not ignore the deficit, he and the Democrats must avoid overreacting to an issue that is generally a stalking horse for a lousy economy. If the economy shows signs of improvement, as it likely will when the stimulus package begins to kick in, I would be willing to make a small wager today that concerns over the deficit will decline. In the end, Democrats will live or die by not only the strength of the economy, but also by the ambition of their policy goals.
As for the notion that Obama should be tied down by perceptions of what he thinks the country “can accept,” frankly this is even worse advice. As Galston notes, voters “have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency.”
But the way to change that perception is not to nibble around the edges, but instead move forward a piece of legislation that changes the entire political equation for Democrats: something like passing a sweeping health care package. The negative perception that voters continue to have toward government is because, as Obama suggested during the campaign, they don’t see it being responsive to their needs.
Forget the polls for just a second. In November 2008, the electorate voted not only for change, but they voted to send someone to Washington who would change the tone, bring new ideas and get things done. Passing comprehensive health care reform is the best way I can think of to not only fulfill the promise of Obama’s campaign, but also expose the rigidity of Republican opposition. If Democrats are dealing with a down economy in 2010 they will likely pay a price at the polls, but the best response to bad economic news is evidence that Congress and the President have worked to fulfill their campaign promises. As I asked a few days ago at Politico: “Would Democrats prefer to go to the voters and say, ‘I shrunk the deficit’ or would they rather say, ‘I passed health care legislation that improves access and care for 50 million people — and, by the way, my opponent voted against it?”
I can already imagine the likely response to my confidence: 1993 and 1994. The political path I’m advocating, of course, bears striking similarities to President Clinton’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. The critical difference, however, is the lack of confidence voters have not only in the Republican Party, but for conservatism in general. In addition, there is simply no question that the electorate trusts Obama far more than it did Clinton. I understand, Galston’s pleas for caution and no one who lived through 1993 and 1994 would ever question the dangers of overreaching. But if ever there were a time for overreaching it would be right now

I said in my very last post that I was done talking about you-know-who and his trip to you-know-where, and I’ll try to stick to that. You’d think conservatives would want to let it go, as well. But not Rush Limbaugh, who in an act of chutzpah that is remarkable even for him, is blaming you-know-what on Barack Obama. Here via Christopher Orr is a snippet:

My first thought was he said, ‘To hell with this. The Democrats are destroying the country. We can’t do anything to stop it. I gave everything I had to stop it here in South Carolina.’ … Folks, there are a lot of people looking at life and saying, ‘screw it.’ They’re saying, ‘screw it.’ Before Obama takes away their money, before Obama takes away their house, or the economy takes away their house, there are people who are saying, “To hell with all this…. I’m just going to try to enjoy it as much as I can.’

Thus spake one of the few identifiable leaders of the Republican Party. I hope that this is a broad hint that Limbaugh himself is about to say “screw it” and move his own tired act offshore or off the air.
Go Galt, Rush!

Don’t know about you, readers, but I’m ready to quickly forget about Mark Sanford for a good long while and leave him to whatever reckoning he faces with his family and the people of South Carolina. I’d just as soon not see elaborate exposure of his personal emails, or minute-by-minute scrutiny of how he spent his time on state-paid trade missions to Argentina.
But there are a couple of residual points on the general subject of media coverage of politics that do need to be addressed for future reference.
1) Is the vast attention being paid to the Sanford Saga a flashing warning sign about media or public obsession with the sex lives of politicians, and/or about the spread of a “celebrity gossip” culture into politics?
2) Does the exposure of Sanford show that politicians no longer have any expectation of privacy?
These are questions that we have been hearing at least since the “Monkey Business” scandal derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, and they are both quite legitimate. But if you think about it even briefly, the Sanford Saga doesn’t really fit the troubling template of a salacious public and its media hounds devouring someone’s private life.
First of all, the Sanford story was big-time national news long before it had anything to do with sex. Sure, there was private speculation that something a bit out of line with Sanford’s self-proclaimed “family values” convictions might be going on, and for all I know, some of the Republican politicians in South Carolina who made a big issue of Sanford’s disappearance had reason to think that ol’ debbil Lust was lurking in the background. But for most of us, and in virtually all the public discussion of Sanford’s vanishing act, sex didn’t enter the picture until the governor raised it himself in yesterday’s press conference. Maybe it’s troubling that the explanation Sanford’s staff originally put out–that he chose to spend Father’s Day weekend wandering alone on the Appalachian Trail with no means of communication with the outside world–seemed strange enough to make it a “story” (though again, if his Lieutenant Governor, a fellow Republican if not exactly a friend, hadn’t gone on national television to complain about it, I don’t know how big a “story” it would have been). But this isn’t about any national sex mania.
Second of all, there are certain steps any public official needs to take to maintain an “expectation of privacy.” The very first is to ensure that one’s private life does not interfere with the performance of public duties. I have a very hard time believing that Mark Sanford could not have maintained a communications link with his office without disclosing where he was and what he was doing with whom. I am sure he had been issued what is sometimes jokingly called an “Armageddon Pager” that is used to alert a public official–especially a chief executive–of an emergency. He must have decided to leave it at home; otherwise, his staff would have been able to credibly say: “We don’t know where he is, but we know how to reach him if the need arises.” That would have cut off the whole “who’s in charge?” line of inquiry at the knees. To put it another way, the expectation of privacy for governors (or for that matter, presidents) does not include being unavailable to do your job–not for an hour, much less for five or six days. That’s just part of the job description, and it’s nothing new.
Maybe psychologists can explain why Mark Sanford pursued a course of action almost perfectly designed to draw attention to the behavior he was supposedly trying so hard to hide–or why, in the midst of an illicit affair, or a Friendship With Privileges, or whatever it was, he worked so hard to make himself a national political figure and a putative presidential candidate (sort of a slow-motion equivalent of Gary Hart’s “go ahead and follow me” taunt to reporters asking if he ever fooled around).
But in writing a couple of posts on the Sanford Saga, I can honestly say I don’t feel like I’ve been part of some panting media pack chasing the latest sex story, or violating the governor’s privacy. I personally wish it had turned out that he was just an anti-social or stressed-out man who asked his family for the Father’s Day gift of some peaceful time alone. But he chose to paint the big bullseye on his back, and make it bigger by a career-long habit of moralizing about other people’s behavior (not to mention trying to deny women and gays/lesbians any privacy rights). So let’s forget about the man with a clean conscience.