This part of the campaign was different because it was so intense, being squeezed into just two weeks. Van Hipp came out swinging. He described Mark as liberal, a real taboo in a conservative primary. We suspected that Van Hipp was financing more push polls. Implying it was Mark’s position on the issue, callers asked voters things such as, “Would you vote for Mark Sanford if you knew he favored legalization of drugs?”
Mark got so riled up by this that he went to Hipp’s house in the middle of the night to confront him. When Van opened the door clad only in his boxers, Mark stuck a tape recorder in his face and demanded that he state whether he was behind the calls or not. Van was undaunted by this confrontation. He denied funding the polls, and we couldn’t prove that he was doing so. And misinformation-filled mailings to voters continued: literature saying that Mark Sanford was “pro-abortion” and that he was “for universal health care” though neither was true.
Mark and I found these tactics colossally discouraging, and we vowed we would always run our campaign honorably, never saying something through the campaign medium we were not comfortable saying directly to the opponent. We wanted to change the terms of the debate, to actually have a debate of ideas without getting into the politics of personal destruction. At the end of the day, we believed, people liked honorable men and women in government and if we remained loyal to our values, voters would see Mark in this light. At this moment in the campaign, I understood my value to Mark was much higher than just the fact that I was “free.” If Mark had spent money to hire a campaign manager, not only would he have used precious resources, but he would likely have been strongly advised to respond to negative attacks in kind, thus compromising those values that I knew were so important to us both.
Unbelievably—to many, even to us—Mark won fifty-two percent of the vote in the runoff primary. What an upset! It seemed to us that the stars were aligning, and the shot in the arm that this win gave both Mark and his campaign staff would be the fuel for most of our future confidence. We celebrated heartily with volunteers and friends and family on election night and my happiness and my pride and my excitement was real. Yet I couldn’t wait for the festivities to end so that I could get to sleep. But of course, the activity never stopped. We were immediately swept into the next race for the general election.
This time the Republican Party was united behind Mark. We were one of the hopefuls that would be part of a Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives, and all eyes were focused on winning against our Democratic opponent, Robert Barber. Fundraising was much easier as the national party sent other politicians such as Dick Armey and Jack Kemp down to star at events and help raise more money. People came out of the woodwork to volunteer or to offer their advice or their services. Suddenly the campaign had outgrown the space we had available in our garage, so when a supporter offered to provide us with an office down the street from our house, we moved to more professional environs.
As the campaign expanded rapidly, I tried to step down as campaign manager. The general election felt quite different from our grass roots, ideological efforts at home. More was at stake and the effort was bigger and less personal than when we were working just to get Mark through the primary. I wanted to return to being a mom, but our media consultant pleaded with me not to, as he didn’t want us to fix what wasn’t broken. Mark understood that I wanted to step back and he understood why, but he begged me to stay on. We had made it this far together, he reasoned, and we had been a winning formula.
I struck a deal of sorts. I agreed to stay, but we would engage others to lighten my load. I know we actually hired one person but there were quite a few people with serious campaign experience who joined us as volunteers, too, and their combined support helped relieve me of the exhausting fulltime detail. Nevertheless, we didn’t fully trust the agendas of all our new “friends” in this campaign, especially after the day we discovered two volunteers rifling through files they didn’t need to be looking through. When they couldn’t really explain what they were up to, we asked them to leave. From then on we kept an eye on all unknown newcomers. Mark and I continued to keep the real decision making between ourselves and our media adviser.
Late in September, Mark and I traveled to Washington, DC, so that he could sign Newt Gingrich’s famed Contract with America. It was on this trip that we began to feel like we were on a much larger team: We met so many other Republican candidates and U.S. Representatives who all wanted to help us win. As collegial as that began to make us feel, we learned that with these higher stakes came dirtier tricks, and we were naïve enough to take real offense, to be bothered by it. As we arrived at a Republican fundraising dinner that evening, there were picketers outside the entrance. Mark saw a few holding signs with his name on them that said things like “Sanford you’re eating the heart of the lowcountry.” Mark, honestly wanting to know what he had done that upset these picketers, went up to one to ask him directly. After tapping the man with the sign on the shoulder, he discovered the man had clearly been hired to hold the sign: He had no clue who Mark Sanford was and could barely speak a word of English.
During this brief trip, we also discovered how deeply the opposition would be willing to dig to oppose Mark’s candidacy. A reporter we met there showed Mark a full-page ad printed in Roll Call magazine and paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that listed ten Republican candidates for Congress, including Mark. On the other column was a list of things these ten had done. The idea of the ad was to match the name of the candidate with their past. The list had all sorts of outlandish credentials like “claims that white, Anglo-Saxon men are an endangered species” or this candidate “claims Greeks and Romans were homosexuals” and so on. I looked at the list and had no clue which act was attributed to the man I was married to. After eliminating the ones I knew could not have been Mark’s doing, I narrowed it down to Mark having been a “goose exterminator.” I asked him if he’d ever been one. It turned out one summer during college he worked to control the goose population in New Zealand by shooting geese and injecting poison into unhatched eggs, something I’d never known, yet the press had managed to find out before me.
Goose exterminator or not, the contrast between Mark and his Democratic opponent Robert Barber was clear, no more so on display than when Barber falsely claimed Mark opposed hiring more police and that he advocated legalization of prostitution. When asked if he would support a specific bill on crime, Mark responded that he would not because of the wasteful spending in the bill. Barber used Mark’s stance, absurdly, to label him as “pro-crime.”
When Barber’s attacks on Mark’s positions on the issues didn’t cause him to gain any ground, he went after Mark’s personal life. He tried to paint Mark as a wealthy tourist from out-of-state, although in fact the Sanfords had moved to South Carolina from Florida fifteen years earlier and had spent every summer there before that. His tone implied that if you are successful or of means, you are unfit to represent a congressional district. Then he picked on Mark for not voting in every election, as he had not registered to vote during the year and a half he lived in New York City.
In my mind, this just meant he was a normal citizen; when he had moved away he hadn’t bothered to change a lot of things, including his driver’s license. He had known the move north would be temporary. That “normal guy” image was what we emphasized in our ads. The style was friendly and direct, with Mark speaking to the voters about the issues he cared about, no gimmicks or sleazy attacks. Perhaps that was what made people believe that they knew him. After just a few weeks of running our ads, Mark went from a virtual unknown to someone who was recognized on the street. Suddenly when he knocked on doors, he was greeted warmly. He relished it when someone gave him a thumbs-up or told him they agreed with his positions and would likely vote for him in the upcoming election. I think that even with all the perks and parties and praise that comes with political success, there is nothing quite as empowering in all of politics as the unso
licited thanks of someone on the street.
On election night, almost exactly one year after beginning our stitched-together campaign, we held our celebration at Calder’s Pub on King Street in Charleston. Mark won the election with sixty-seven percent of the vote, almost 95,000 votes: a very healthy total. We had run an almost flawless campaign—rising from two percent in the polls in just four months. We won despite spending much less money than our opponents in each of the three elections. By focusing exclusively on the issues Mark cared about, we ran an honorable and effective campaign, never once taking our eye off the ball. Republicans were elected in many districts all across the nation that same night as control of the House was transferred from the Democrats to the Republicans for the first time in decades. Through our victory we were joining up with a movement that pledged to take the country in a bold, new direction.
For me, however, that election victory was not as exciting as the primary had been. In such a heavily Republican and conservative district, Mark’s chances had been very good once he became the party candidate. My excitement was at the prospect of getting back to a more normal life. Marshall was now speaking in full sentences and potty training while Landon had just taken his first steps. They were swept up in the activity too but I yearned for more time with them, time when we could enjoy being instead of doing.
In an interview I gave to our local paper the next day about the election and my expectations, I said boldly that I’d never liked politics, didn’t want to be involved in politics, and, “now that this campaign is over, I’m finished with politics.” The story went on:
“I was exhausted,” she said. “I couldn’t answer one more stupid question. I couldn’t smile at one more person. I missed being with my children.”
Mrs. Sanford isn’t sure what comes next—whether she’ll stay in her Wentworth Street house or move to Washington.
Right now, she says, she’s focused on something more immediate. After the ten houseguests leave and the pillows are put away, she’s going to spend a night at home with her family. No one else. She’ll wear blue jeans and eat popcorn. She won’t answer the phone. Better yet, the phone won’t even ring.
After that, she wants to see her friends, read something beside political treatises, and play some tennis or golf. (Post and Courier, November 10, 1994)
Little did I know then that the busyness was far from over, the houseguests would linger, and my desire for time alone with my family would become the fight of my life thereafter.
Looking back I now realize this was the beginning of Mark’s unyielding loyalty to the conservative principles of fiscal stewardship and limited government. It is this unyielding loyalty to principle that is so rare in politics and yet it is perhaps this same unyielding focus on these conservative principles that caused Mark to lose sight, over time, of his personal values that I think matter more. It is one thing to campaign on the issues but I was soon to learn that in elected office one’s adherence to the issues is challenged continually. Mark’s loyalty to the issues from then on would be seriously tested and so would his loyalty to me and to himself.
SIX
AT THE MOMENT WHEN MARK WON HIS SEAT IN CONGRESS, WE were the closest we’d ever been, victorious in something that we started from just a table in a chilly garage. My commitment to manage his campaign was one of those here and now choices. Mark had a dream and working with him to achieve it was a way to help him feel more fully alive. When I said I’d do it, I was taking the long view, imagining we would reminisce some day about what great fun we had that crazy time he decided to run for Congress. I gave it my all, and improbably, I became the wife of a politician.
We made another quick series of decisions about what seemed to make sense in the day to day. A congressional salary is nothing compared to Wall Street standards, or of one in real estate, so we had to think carefully about how we were going to live within our means. The first decision was whether our family would move with Mark to DC or remain in Charleston.
The House of Representatives’ two-year term makes it the elected body most responsive to the people. What this meant for a political newcomer like Mark is that he had to be home in the district as often as he could on weekends to remind the voters who he was and what he was doing for them. The government will cover the cost for a congressman to travel home if his time home includes official business. The government will not, however, cover the cost of flights to DC for visits by the representative’s spouse and children. We decided we would see more of Mark if we remained in South Carolina and saw him on trips home. Logical, yes, but amazing to me now, how naïve I was to agree to being a single mother four or more days a week. In my own defense, I know now that raising the boys didn’t give me much time to think!
Shortly after he was elected, I traveled to DC with Mark for orientation and to help him look at apartments. Of course, he was only looking at cheap places in neighborhoods that seemed very dangerous to me. When he decided to sleep in his office on a futon, my mother called me, alarmed.
“You can’t let him sleep in his office!” she said.
“Why not?” I responded. As if I could somehow get Mark to change his mind!
“Well that’s just not okay for anyone to live that way, and what will he do when you visit?”
“Mom, I think it’s just fine.” I said. “I saw the awful apartments he wanted to rent and I would be worried for his safety in them, and mine as well. If I were to visit him there, I would likely find myself cleaning the place. If he sleeps in his office, when I visit once or twice a year, I can stay in a hotel for a nice break and he can visit me,” I explained.
She saw immediately where I was coming from and agreed we had a good plan.
When I think back to the two of us at that time in our lives, I marvel at how wonderfully naïve and idealistic we were. We saw the world as black or white and were dismissive of those who saw it in shades of gray. Through the campaign for Congress, my love for my husband deepened as I saw him refuse to be swayed from his beliefs in order to pick up a few votes or an endorsement. He would rather lose the campaign than win it through sleazy compromises, and my idealistic young heart swelled with pride to be married to such a principled man.
But after our principled campaign, we took a crash course in the reality of rules-to-live-by for elected officials. It became immediately apparent to me that campaigns never end; they are a constant part of public life, and public officials follow an entirely different set of standards. I didn’t believe that Mark would get caught in these traps because of his loyalty to his core beliefs.
We’ve all seen many times how a candidate promises to lead courageously and follow ideals, then the endless horse trading of being an elected official causes those ideals to slip. In the crude reality that exists behind the scenes, every issue has a history, constituencies on differing sides, as well as lobbyists for or against flattering the legislators and offering them trips and lavish meals to curry favor. In order to get anything done, representatives trade a vote on a bill they don’t really believe in for promises of support on another bill. Bit by bit, those initial ideals and goals get chipped away. All the more reason, Mark and I believed, to keep them in focus and make every decision guided by a conscious appreciation of them. Mark’s constant struggle to hew to his own standards of frugality, for instance, was not just a virtue he would promote in government, but one that he would demonstrate in his daily life in Congress.
From the very first day, he closely watched expenses in the office, requiring the staff to save paperclips and copy on the reverse side of used paper. As long as the federal budget remained unbalanced, Mark refused to take a pay increase, instead donating the raise the representatives voted themselves to charity. (In his first year in office, with what he saved on administrative costs, Mark also returned more than $200,000 in funds to the U.S. Treasury.) Plus, on principle, he refused the franking privileges, which allow representatives to send mail for free. Mark believed this amounted to a campai
gn subsidy that protected incumbents at the expense of citizen legislators like himself.
Once he got to Congress, Mark’s Cinderella story captivated the national media, which was charmed too by the fact that Mark wasn’t just a deficit hawk on the stump. He caught the first possible plane home when voting ended, bringing his dirty laundry back each weekend. He bragged about how he could survive two weeks on a $20 bill by grazing at lobbyist-funded receptions and being driven by staff to required events. When the press found out where he was living, images of the futon in the middle of his grand congressional office space made great television. Mark found the attention difficult to refuse. In truth, he relished every bit of the glare and soon grew to seek it.
As the media lavished attention on him, the people in our district became more aware of his budding national presence. They called or wrote to tell Mark how proud they were of his election, and how hopeful they were that he would succeed. Where fundraising had been nearly impossible during our first campaign, suddenly unsolicited checks filled the mailbox, along with offers from complete strangers who wanted to host fundraisers for Mark’s reelection.
I learned immediately of “the almighty schedule” and of the importance of fighting for open time for our family. The scheduler booked Mark’s time in five-minute increments throughout each day and into the evening. If Mark allowed it (and he largely did), he could fully book each evening and weekend with speeches, dinners, parades, or even with travel to spots around the world to learn more about the issues being debated and discussed in Congress. There were many weekends when Mark was home in name only. He’d show up, hand me his laundry, spend a few precious hours with the boys and me, then be off to an all-day marathon of public events and fundraisers.
Staying True Page 7
