Mr. Sanford's Wild Ride (Page 2)

One sunny morning in late April, I attended a job fair at Columbia's National Guard Armory, not far from the Statehouse. Hundreds of down-on-their-luck South Carolinians went from booth to booth discovering that for every company hiring--Verizon was looking for sales staff--there were others pitching training programs with no guarantee of a paycheck.

As he was leaving, I spoke with Gary Grimes, 55, who had been laid off seven months earlier from his job at Flextronics, a multinational manufacturing company with a plant in West Columbia. He and his wife, who had also recently lost her job, were scraping by on food stamps and unemployment insurance--insurance that Sanford had threatened in December to cut off unless the state agency that disbursed unemployment checks agreed to a new audit. (On January 1, just hours before the fund was to run out, Sanford capitulated and applied for a $146 million federal loan.) A lifelong Republican, Grimes was puzzled by Sanford's stance on the stimulus. "I know we'll have to pay the money back later, but at the same time, the state's hurting and we need the money," he said. "It looks like the governor's just playing politics."

I spent that afternoon in the observation balcony of the State Senate chambers alongside children from Greenville's Welcome Elementary School. The third graders were on a field trip, and they caused a brief commotion as they leaned over the railing to take photos. The august men below--there's not a single woman in the State Senate--were debating the 2009-10 appropriations bill. Tax revenue had plummeted; even though the $5.7 billion spending plan the Legislature passed included the $700 million in federal funds, it fell about $1 billion short of the previous year's plan.

Congress has mandated that the disputed $700 million--one-tenth of the total allocated for South Carolina under the $787 billion federal stimulus package, but the only part the governor believed was within his power to reject--be disbursed over two years for education and law enforcement. Sanford wanted to redirect the money to pay down state debt, and he stood prepared to see it go to other states even though South Carolinians would still have been on the hook to pay it back. "Going further into debt will not solve a problem that was created by too much debt," he said in a televised address defending his position.

But the governor's position was not a popular one in South Carolina. His approval rating had fallen to 40 percent by April, and other GOP lawmakers were questioning his priorities. South Carolina's AAA credit rating places it among states with the lowest general-obligation debt, and it is not unduly burdensome, said State Treasurer Converse Chellis. "If my house was burning down, I don't get in my car and drive to the bank to pay off the mortgage," added GOP State Senator Hugh Leatherman, chair of the budget-writing committee. "I try to put out the fire."

Leatherman's metaphor was apt, because South Carolina was going up in flames--literally. At the very moment the legislators were deliberating, the state's worst wildfire in more than thirty years was raging around Myrtle Beach. Months earlier, state forester Gene Kodama had warned that budget cuts at the Forestry Commission put the state "in a very vulnerable position," and now, at a moment of need, he was making do with fewer firefighters and creaky equipment. (More than $500,000 of the disputed stimulus money was allocated to the Forestry Commission, Sanford's critics were quick to point out.)

Given the state's suffering and Sanford's insouciance, it struck me even before the revelation of the affair that he would not easily win another statewide office, let alone the presidency. Still, when I pressed Gary Grimes, he conceded he'd have a hard time voting for Obama over Sanford--or any Republican. "It's not that I'm a fan of the governor. It's just that Democrats are proabortion, and unless they change that, they'll never get my vote."

Sanford is not likely to exploit the cultural wedge issues that concern voters like Grimes, a fact that distinguishes him from Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and other culture warriors who might have rivaled him for the presidential nomination. Last year, for instance, he declined to add his signature to a bill endorsing an "I Believe" line of vanity license plates bearing the image of a cross. "It is my personal view that the largest proclamation of one's faith ought to be in how one lives his life," said Sanford, an Episcopalian. (Now that he has exposed himself as an adulterer, Sanford admits he fell short of his own standards and speaks of his indiscretions as "sins.")

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