The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

Mark Sanford and the Divine Excuse Note

The Associated Press ran an article this weekend dicussing South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's recent commentary on his recent troubles.  (I've linked to the MSNBC posting of the AP article.)

For anyone who has been living under a rock, Gov. Sanford managed to get himself into a mess when he headed to Argentina in June for a few days of....international diplomacy....with his ladyfriend.  Oh, by the way, he sort of didn't bother to tell anyone in his administration where he was, which basically left the Palmetto State rudderless for about a week.

Personally, I don't have much interest in the details of his Argentinian holiday.  Such matters are best resolved by the people immediately involved, and the specifics are secondary to the fact that he vanished for a week while the State's business twisted in the wind. ¹

Leaving an entire state without clear leadership for a week, however, is another matter.  The people of South Carolina have certain expectations about what a Governor should be doing, and I'll say with a high degree of confidence that one of those expectations is that if the Governor will be indisposed for a few days, he will take the necessary steps to ensure that his official duties are attended to (which, according to the South Carolina Constitution, appears to consist of written notification to the Legislature, at which point the Lieutenant Governor steps up²).  Sanford failed, miserably, to do that.  I personally think that there should be very serious consideration to removing Sanford from office on those grounds. 

This brings us to Sanford's Divine Excuse Note.

Sanford, in his opinion piece, goes on at length about how God is using these events to make him (Sanford) a better leader:

It is true that I did wrong and failed at the largest of levels, but equally true is the fact that God can make good of our respective wrongs in life. In this vein, while none of us has the chance to attend our own funeral, in many ways I feel like I was at my own in the past weeks, and surprisingly I am thankful for the perspective it has afforded.

If you ever have the misfortune of being at this point, whether self-induced as in my case or not, it will give you an indeed amazing perspective on life and on what really matters. [...]

It's in the spirit of making good from bad that I am committing to you and the larger family of South Carolinians to use this experience to both trust God in his larger work of changing me, and from my end, to work to becoming a better and more effective leader.  (Emphases mine - CB.)

I have to admit that I always look at statements like this with more than a little disdain. 

The point of statements like this is to throw up a smokescreen.  The message here is "Yeah, I screwed up, but it's all good because God is going to change me through this so you can all just forget about it and move on."

Pardon me for being cynical.

It doesn't take much to admit do doing something that you were caught red handed doing.  Sanford's activities are well-documented at this stage, and denying them now would be pointless. ³

If he had simply said "I fully accept the consequences of my actions and will strive to do better in the future", he'd have been fine (well, better, anyway.)  Bringing God into the situation is an attempt to shift the responsibility away from himself - if God has a larger plan for changing Sanford, then Sanford's recent troubles are not only positive things, but actually necessary.  (Sanford avoids saying this explicitly, but if he's going to claim that these troubles somehow fit into God's "larger work of changing" him,  then he must deal with the logical consequence that God either caused or allowed those troubles to occur - a consequence that makes a lot of people squirm uncomfortably. )  Perhaps more importantly, Sanford now has an escape clause.  If he doesn't become "a better and more effective leader", or if he takes another vacation to Argentina, he can always claim that God is still working. 

It's instructive to consider the importance of the fact that nothing serious happened in South Carolina during Sanford's time away - no civil emergencies, no severe weather outbreaks - and think about how the spin would be different if there had been.  If people had died because of delays in activating emergency plans because Sanford's location was unknown and he hadn't taken the normal steps to transfer power, I do not think there would be any question about removing him from office.  I do not think he'd be writing opinion pieces claiming that those notional deaths fit into God's work of changing him. 

And I don't think the media would much care about what he was doing in Argentina.⁴ 

CB

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¹That politicians fool around shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. I strongly suspect that a significant majority of elected officials have that particular skeleton in their closets.  It's an arguable point whether that skeleton, in and of itself, makes much difference in one's abilities to govern.

²The South Carolina Constitution, Article IV, lists the qualifications for Governor as follows:

SECTION 2. Qualifications of Governor.

No person shall be eligible to the office of Governor who denies the existence of the Supreme Being; and who on the date of such election has not attained the age of thirty years; and who shall not have been a citizen of the United States and a citizen and resident of this State for five years next preceding the day of election. No person while Governor shall hold any office or other commission (except in the militia) under the authority of this State, or of any other power. (1972 (57) 3171; 1973 (58) 48.)

Do we have an Establishment Clause violation here?

³It's not crystal clear which aspect of things Sanford is more concerned about. Although he emphasizes the political consequences more, he does make some oblique references to the impacts on his family.

⁴The topic at hand is but one aspect of a larger topic called theodicy, which attempts to address the problem of evil (or suffering) in the context of a universe with a tri-omni God.   Bart Ehrman writes very eloquently on this topic in his book God's Problem.  The problem of evil is one that has occupied theologians and philosophers for a long time, and leads to a lot of <ahem> spirited discussions even today.