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There is a politician's playbook for coping with an extramarital affair that explodes into scandal.
But Mark Sanford did not operate from that playbook. Instead, the embattled S.C. governor took a different course.
“He's made a lot of the classic mistakes you make in a crisis,” said Shell Suber, the former political director for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's re-election campaign who now works as a Columbia-based strategist with the Felkel Group. “He's perpetuating the story. Every time he talks, he offers more detail and more contradictory detail.”
Political strategists say Sanford has done just about everything wrong in his attempt to manage the fallout from his affair with a woman in Argentina.
He lied about it. He tried to cover it up. Then, he admitted it – parts of it, anyway. And then he offered up sensational details, some of which contradicted sensational details he had offered before.
The standard response
There is a script for such matters, and political strategists say Sanford did not have to stick to it, though it is often followed in such scandals.
First, the politician reads from a prepared statement expressing sorrow to the betrayed wife, usually at the politician's side, and for letting down supporters.
That script also calls for a swift but brief exit from the public stage, followed by a well-managed re-entry for official duties, which shows the public that the wayward politician is back on the job.
Sanford – ever the maverick loner – chose his own damage-control script.
But, in moving beyond the standard response, Carol Dahmen, a political strategist who worked for former California Gov. Gray Davis, and other strategists said, the governor should have:
Admitted the affair to staff and the public. Sanford did, but then kept adding and changing details.
Offered an unequivocal apology. Sanford did, but to his lover before his wife. He then continued to refer to his lover as his “soul mate.”
Made whatever restitution was necessary without prompting. Sanford did, after prompting.
Got back to work.
Dahmen, however, said it's hard to get some politicians – whose outsized egos and enhanced opinion of themselves help get them elected – to heed the advice of others amid scandal.
“They almost don't believe it's happened to them,” she said. “You have to swallow your pride, and I haven't really seen that.”
Suber said staffers have a hard time suggesting painful paths to their boss.
“Your normal advisers around, they're probably not the most equipped people to help you with this,” he said. “It's best to seek someone from outside, even if you don't know them that well. The staff, they're also hurt. And that may color what they do.”
Some allies have suggested the governor could use the help. The governor's spokesman, Joel Sawyer, said the governor has not hired anyone to help him manage his response to the scandal.
Jeri Cabot, an adjunct professor of political science at the College of Charleston, said the governor's 18-minute confession June 24 to the affair was poorly managed right down to the detail of staging it in an area where young people were standing behind him, smirking.
But the extensive interview with The Associated Press on Monday and Tuesday was perhaps most damaging of all, Cabot said.
“You would think that his staff would have called for a huddle and said, ‘If you're going to go out there, this is what you need to say.'”
In that interview, Sanford acknowledged he had met with his mistress more often than he had previously disclosed, called her his soul mate, said he will try to fall in love again with his wife and said he “crossed the lines” with other women – but not “the ultimate line.”
If Sanford is to continue in office, political strategists said, he needs to learn discipline, take on a manageable issue and get back to work.
“Right now,” Dahmen said, “the less he says, the better.”
