The governor was not known as a moralist but has frowned on infidelity and as a congressman voted to impeach President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair. “He lied under a different oath, and that’s the oath to his wife,” Mr. Sanford said at the time on CNN. “So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”
— Robbie Brown and Shaila Dewan, New York Times, June 24, 2009

As television pundits noted on Wednesday, confessions by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York that he had been involved with a prostitute and by former Gov. Jim McGreevey of New Jersey that he had been unfaithful to his wife with a gay lover did not hurt Democrats nationally, although both men resigned.
— Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, June 24, 2009

Aye, and there's the rub.

Normally with any story involving sex, I'd just assume everyone knew about it because, hey, sex. But it's always possible that someone worked or slept through the most recent news cycle, so here's a recap:

Last Thursday, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, a republican, left his office in disarray and boarded a plane to Argentina. By Monday, political opponents and reporters demanded to know the whereabouts of the missing governor, at which point his office issued a strange announcement, saying he'd gone on a kind of walkabout on the Appalachian Trail. However, witnesses claimed to have seen him boarding a plane in Atlanta, GA., over the weekend. Then, yesterday, the governor gave a press conference in which he tearfully admitted a brief affair affair of less than a year with a woman residing in Buenos Aires (although he had counted her as a friend for the last eight years).

Watching his press conference must have been tough for anyone. At times it seemed almost impossible that he could get through it. As far as these things go, it was one of the rawest and seemingly most honest. The prepared statements weren't enough, if they were even prepared. His wife, Jenny, wasn't in attendance, which not only greatly minimized the ick factor but also greatly increased the human one. The presence of the wronged spouse always appears to be another instance of spin, a united front — Together We Go Forward — and the fact that Mrs. Sanford stayed home seemed to signal a great capacity for being realistic about how much this hurts people. And in case that didn't, Sanford's demeanor did.

So why will people have fun with this? That can probably be answered in a word: values.

As author Geoffrey Nunberg points out in Talking Right, the word "values" is almost comically meaningless at this point. Having values is like having skin. Granted, it's theoretically possible to be alive without either, but everyone has them. But what conservatives in America have done, quite brilliantly, is take a nondescript noun and "synonymize" it with a specific set of conservative values. It's a kind of noun hijacking. Almost all of us would find someone who doesn't have "values" suspect, but by wedding the word to conservative social and economic platforms for decades, GOP strategists have cleverly made it so that opponents almost have to embrace them before repudiating them. It's as if it forces them to say, "Yes, I have values, and we agree that they are good, but here's why mine are different from what you're thinking," which very cleverly obliges the opponent to indicate he is "different" from this abstracted list of "values" that make you a "Good American."

Unfortunately, using "values" as some kind of Excalibur of electability cuts back on its user in two ways. Sure, it's allowed conservatives to virtually control the political language war unfettered for two decades, but it's also obliged them to embody the abstracted concept that they've foisted on the political discourse. At the same time, it's made them more reliant on the evangelical/devout roughly 30% of the American population they need to win national elections. Thus they're beholden to practice what they preach and practice what their absolutely essential voting bloc preaches as well.

Thus the pity of Mark Sanford. I feel terrible for his wife and children, but I can't help but feel bad for the guy, too. Something was wrong; maybe he disliked himself or felt lonely or needed to feel young and wanted again. Who knows? All we can say for certain is that one of his motivations was doubtless one of the many that have existed — just like the act itself — through every epoch of human history (at least for certain) since the invention of the epic poem. What he did was neither republican nor democratic, could be done conservatively or liberally or both — possibly with someone named Tory and, if done unsafely, in a way that eventually produces labor. But what it was, was basically human.

No reasonable person really believes that every member of a party thinks and behaves like every other member, but Sanford will almost certainly be cut with the same tool his party's used, even if he may have only used it himself in passing dismissal of Bill Clinton. Once you create this kind of political weapon, it works just as well for both sides in a purely tit-for-tat sense. But if you couple wielding it with a demonstration of your own superior rectitude, you open yourself to destruction at the hands of it and hypocrisy.

That's the rub mentioned above. The American people are tremendously forgiving and willing to look the other way in most cases. Bill Clinton's approval ratings during his impeachment trial would have been the envy of the Bush administration's during its last three years. As Jean Edward Smith points out, FDR was not only callous and obvious about his affairs throughout his life, he died at his mistress's house (which wasn't exactly secret), yet millions still lined the railroad tracks as his funeral train passed by. Although we'd be foolhardy to assume most Americans knew his circumstances, enough knew to make it notable that it didn't become an issue. What the American people tend to get fussy about are those who demand pledges of others they're not willing to abide by themselves.

All the liberal schadenfreude in the world won't sabotage Mark Sanford's political future — nor, really, will this act. The problem is, regardless of whether he himself has taken part, his party has linguistically rewritten the political landscape. The tremendous profit of "values," as Nunberg points out, is that its proper usage makes it synonymous with whatever you're for while making your opponent embrace and employ the term even to change its definition. By making "values" universal, by making its invocation mandatory, it makes any deviation from it more dire.

Even if in erring Sanford indicated again what it is to be human, a party animal is different. Either to maintain the control of a powerful bloc of religious votes or merely to maintain control of the "values" term that serves the GOP so well, Mark Sanford will probably be quietly booted away from the 2012 race, the spotlight and perhaps even his office.