What Does Sanford's Victory Mean?

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Be honest. You aren't really surprised by this, are you?

Because, if you are, you don't know much about American history and politics.

Mark Sanford, the Republican former governor of South Carolina who resigned nearly four years ago when his extramarital affair with an Argentinian woman was revealed, apparently has won the special election to fill the House vacancy that was created when Rep. Tim Scott was selected to replace retiring Sen. Jim DeMint.

When Sanford resigned in 2009, most political experts thought his political career was over. Certainly, his marriage was over.

And recent polls suggested that Sanford's comeback race with Elizabeth Colbert Busch (the sister of Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert) was a dead heat.

Democrats face an uphill battle to gain a majority in the House, as I observed the other day, and many were tantalized by the prospect of winning the open district in South Carolina. It has been in Republican hands since 1981 (including the years when Sanford represented the district prior to being elected governor).

Such a victory wouldn't have assured Democrats that they would win control of the House in next year's midterms, but it would have reduced the number of seats they need to win to achieve that goal — and it would have given the Democrats a shot of confidence when worries about the implementation of Obamacare and hearings on Benghazi are bringing that confidence level down, especially among Democrats who must face the voters next year.

But it wasn't to be.

Not only didn't Colbert Busch win, it wasn't even as close as polls had suggested. With nearly all the votes counted, Sanford has a comfortable 54%–45% lead.

If you're a Democrat and you want to take some kind of victory from this, Colbert Busch did get a higher share of the vote than anyone who has challenged Sanford in the First District in the past.

It's no disgrace for a Democrat to lose in South Carolina. Most of them do. This isn't the same thing as when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in dark–blue Massachusetts. That was a clear sign of trouble ahead for Democrats in the 2010 midterms.

This loss is hardly a harbinger of things to come. If anything, though, it supports what I wrote the other day. Barring any unexpected developments, I think 2014 will be a status quo election in which any gain for either party will be small.

So what does this special election mean — if anything?

I'm inclined to think it doesn't mean nearly as much as some pundits are making it out to mean.

Remember, we're talking about South Carolina here — not North Carolina, the state that unexpectedly voted narrowly for Barack Obama in 2008.

South Carolina is a Republican state. It has voted for Republican nominees for president in nine consecutive elections — and in 12 of the last 13. Eight of the nine members of the state's congressional delegation are Republicans.

Since 1987, only one Democrat has been elected to a single four–year term as governor — and he lost his bid for a second term to none other than Sanford.

OK, Sanford has some personal issues stemming from his extramarital relationship (for the record, his mistress is now his fiancee). He addressed those issues openly and candidly early in the campaign and focused on other subjects later in the race.

You may not like what he had to say, and, if you are registered to vote in South Carolina's First District, you had the opportunity today to vote against him on the basis of his personal life — or for any other reason. Apparently, not many did. At least, as far as Democrats are concerned, not enough did.

Colbert Busch and the Democrats continued to try to make an issue of Sanford's relationship. But it just wasn't compelling enough for voters to turn their backs on more than three decades of electoral history — not for a Democrat with no political experience at all.

If Democrats want something to worry about, it's this.

The national Republican Party abandoned Sanford in this campaign. He was on his own. Meanwhile, Colbert Busch had the active support of the national Democrat Party — as well as other prominent organizations — and still fell short by about 13,000 votes (out of about 142,000 votes cast). Sanford also carried every county in the district.

If the Democrats were ever going to pull off an upset in the First District, this was the time for it. Such an opportunity is not likely to come again any time soon.

Limping Along to the Midterms

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It is my understanding that the term lame duck has been in use for more than 250 years.

It hasn't always been applied to politics. In fact, I've heard its origin was financial. Sometime during the Civil War, it began to be applied to politicians.

Usually, the term is applied to officeholders who are leaving office when their current terms expire — whether they are doing so voluntarily or involuntarily.

Ever since the passage of the 22nd Amendment, which imposed term limits on the office of president, a chief executive is said to be a lame duck — one who loses influence the closer he gets to to the end of his tenure — immediately after his re–election campaign ends, whether he wins or loses.

If he loses (i.e., Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush), he will be a lame duck for a couple of months. It is, of course, humiliating for an incumbent to be rejected by the voters. But, in many ways, it is worse to win re–election. Historically, presidents have enjoyed more power in their first terms than in their second, presumably because the aura of invincibility is gone. The loyal opposition is no longer cowed by an incumbent who will be gone in a few years.

Once the second–term midterms are over, both parties are pretty much in full election mode in anticipation of the open seat in the Oval Office — and the incumbent president becomes largely irrelevant.

(The 22nd Amendment was approved in the 1940s. Until then, presidential tenures were limited only by tradition — and voter preferences.)

That might change if term limits were imposed on all members of Congress. I don't know if such a thing would be constitutional. It might be unsustainable as a violation of states' rights. But if members of Congress were term–limited and faced the possibility of having to deal with only one president for most of their tenures, it might have a profound effect on the implementation of federal policy.

But that is another discussion for another time.

Today I want to address the chances for the president's party to take control of the House in next year's midterms — and give Barack Obama Democrat majorities in both chambers of Congress for the last two years of his presidency.

(That assumes, of course, that the Democrats will hold on to their majority in the Senate, which will be a tall order by itself, given that Democrat–held seats will be on the ballots in red states like Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina and South Dakota.)

At the very least, Democrats need to win 17 seats to take the majority in the House. The situation would be far from ideal if they won only 17. The razor–thin margin would leave no room for error in our polarized democracy, and, as the Democrats' recent setback in the gun–control debate demonstrated, Obama needs that margin for error.

Clearly, the ideal situation would be for the Democrats to have a little breathing room, which probably would require them to capture at least two dozen GOP–held seats.

That may not sound like an impossible task to modern voters, who have seen three elections in just the last decade in which that many seats (or more) flipped to the opposition party — but consider this.

In each of those elections (and two of them were midterms), the flips went against the party that held the White House.

That's the way midterm elections tend to go — and, in more than two centuries of American history, midterm elections have almost always gone against the party in the White House.

Sure, there are exceptions to that — recent ones, in fact — but there were unusual forces at work each time.

In 2002, George W. Bush's Republicans gained ground in the congressional midterms, thanks in large part to Bush's popularity in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and his appeal to patriotism in the buildup for the invasion of Iraq.

And four years earlier, Bill Clinton's Democrats picked up some congressional seats. The economy was booming, and Republicans were seen as having overreached with their attempt to remove Clinton from office.

Besides, after the historic Republican landslide in the 1994 midterms, Democrats really didn't have too many vulnerable congressional seats to defend in 1998.

If you insist on being one of those "the glass is half full" kinds of people — or if you've been drinking a lot of Kool–Aid from that glass — you might see conditions in America being considerably different a year from now than I do.

But I don't see anything like an economic boom on the horizon, not with the implementation of Obamacare coming up and the staggering unemployment crisis that has been allowed to fester (and will, in all probability, grow as a consequence of Obamacare). And, while Republicans don't speak of Obama in glowing terms, neither have they been overreaching the way their forebears did with impeachment 15 years ago; I see no similar backlash that could benefit Democrats.

Barring any unforeseen changes in the next year, 2014 is shaping up to be more like most midterms — and, historically speaking, the second midterm of a president's presidency is worse than the first.

That could be devastating for Obama. He barely clung to his party's Senate majority in his first midterm elections, losing his bullet–proof filibuster–proof advantage in the process, and the House swung to the opposition party by historic proportions.

Just because midterms typically go against the incumbent president's party doesn't mean 2014 will. But my point here is that when incumbents do post midterm gains, it is because circumstances are unusually favorable for them. The circumstances for 2014 don't look too favorable for Obama.

But let's assume that economic circumstances do change for the better. Historically speaking, the tendency for electoral adjustment in American midterms is so strong that such a change probably would not be enough. In 2002 and 1998 — and in 1934, the only other exception I have found — House gains for the incumbent's party were, at best, half of what Obama needs.

Double–digit midterm seat gains in the House have never happened for an incumbent president's party before. Does that mean it can't happen? No. But it does make it exceedingly unlikely, especially since we really only know in hypothetical terms how secure each House district really is since the redistricting that always follows a census. We probably won't have a feel for that until the next presidential election — in 2016.

But we do know a few things about the current House district alignment.

For example, only nine Democrats currently represent districts that Mitt Romney carried in last year's presidential election, and only 17 Republicans currently represent districts that Obama carried. That kind of math doesn't seem particularly favorable for a Democratic takeover.

Of course, the Democrats might not need 17 seats. If Republican former Gov. Mark Sanford's political comeback comes up short in Tuesday's special election in South Carolina's First District, the Democrats might need 16 House seats.

The math still doesn't seem to be there, though, even if Sanford loses.

Short of a dramatic improvement in the economy and/or another instance of overreaching by the Republicans in Congress, the Democrats' best bet is Obama — but he hasn't shown much inclination to campaign for others. Besides, the incumbent's popularity the last two times when the president's party prospered in midterm election was in the 60s — far above Obama, who hovers in 50–50 territory.

Is it impossible for Obama's approval rating to get into 60% territory in the next 18 months? No. Something truly remarkable could happen — the implementation of Obamacare, which is now being characterized as a "train wreck" by members of his own party, could go much better than expected — but right now it looks like a mountain too high.

I wouldn't bet the farm on double–digit gains for Democrats in 2014.

At the same time, though, I wouldn't bet the farm on double–digit gains for Republicans, either. The economy would have to worsen considerably for Republicans to have a realistic shot at that. Some people are predicting that will happen — and, after what we have seen in the last five years, I'm not about to dismiss it — but a kind of acceptable inadequacy is in force.

Unless the acceptable inadequacy becomes unacceptable — and who can say where that line is now? — I expect modest gains for one side or the other in next year's midterms, but nothing approaching double digits.

The Paperless Trail

CNN reports that embattled South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford "wrote in a message to his political action committee e–mail list Monday that while he considered resigning, 'I would ultimately be a better person and of more service in whatever doors God opened next in life if I stuck around to learn lessons rather than running and hiding down at the farm.' "

That sounds good, but it seems to me that, if Sanford is half as smart as he is supposed to be (he has degrees from Furman University and the University of Virginia), he'd be wise to lay off the e–mail.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, in a brief rundown of his e–mail communications with his Argentine mistress, asks, "[W]hat's with Sanford's weird affinity for the word 'wherein?' "

In what she calls the governor's "self–immolating confession tour," Marcus observes that Sanford said, "There were a handful of instances wherein I crossed the lines I shouldn't have crossed as a married man, but never crossed the ultimate line," using a word that he used in his e–mails to his lover.

It led Marcus to remark, "There's something sad about Sanford's inability to ditch his inherent stodginess even in the grip of passion."

Well, he's clearly in the grip of something — but we'll get back to that in a minute.

In recent days, I have been thinking about when it was that I first heard about e–mail. It seems to me that I first heard about e–mail at the reception following my mother's memorial service in May 1995. The internet was still pretty new in those days, and the place where I was working didn't have e–mail. A friend asked me for my e–mail address and I told him I didn't have one.

That wasn't an unusual response in those days, but a lot of things have changed since 1995. Most workplaces have e–mail now. And it's kind of astonishing for me to comprehend how many people really know a lot about how computers and the internet work.

But even folks who are not savvy about a lot of things in the computer world are familiar with a simple reality: You may think that what you've written or received in an e–mail message has been deleted, but the truth is that it never goes away. It's always there, waiting to be found, like the proverbial buried treasure.

On this blog 2½ months ago, I quoted a Baltimore Sun writer's observation that "nothing in cyberspace ever really gets deleted."

The topic on that occasion was the phenomenon called "sexting," which involves nude images taken with cell phones, perhaps accompanied with suggestive messages. With the exception of the pictures, all the activity takes place in the mind.

As far as I know, Sanford and his mistress never exchanged photos of over–exposed bodies, but their actual physical activities apparently left little to the imagination — and the governor apparently couldn't resist the temptation to write about them.

Look, I don't think anyone will deny that love makes you do foolish things. I heard a psychiatrist discussing this on TV earlier today, and she said that clinical observations indicated the brain of an insane person and the brain of a person in the throes of the early stages of love were nearly identical.

So, if it seems that love makes people do crazy things, there apparently is a good reason for that.

In this case, Sanford has said his mistress is his "soulmate," which sounds like he is in love.

Perhaps Sanford's situation can help others, though. If you're falling in love with someone, please stay grounded long enough to realize that you should not, under any circumstances, send e–mails to him/her.

Certainly if you are married with children.

And particularly if you hold political office.

But especially if people are talking about you as a candidate for president.

Buenos Errors

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Today, we're getting a flurry of news — nearly 40% of the states face the possibility of shutdowns as their budget deadlines approach, the world continues to watch as events unfold in Iran, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona school administrators violated a 13–year–old girl's rights with a strip search and actress Farrah Fawcett has died of cancer — and the relationship between South Carolina's governor and a woman from Argentina doesn't seem too important to me.

Mark Sanford's press conference yesterday was a spectacle, all right. After days of speculation concerning his whereabouts, he made what Frank Wooten called in The Post and Courier a "cringe–worthy" appearance before the media.

I've been told that he was regarded as a contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Frankly, I was told the same thing about Nevada Sen. John Ensign, who revealed his own affair less than two weeks ago.

But such talk must have been confined to limited political circles. I consider myself to be pretty well informed on political topics, but I never heard either man mentioned as a serious presidential contender until after the news of their affairs broke.

I'm inclined to believe that these affairs wouldn't be regarded as matters of interest to most people across the nation if it weren't for the fact that both men are members of the Republican Party — the "family values" party — and are mentioned, if only in hindsight, as presidential contenders.

Indeed, I've heard the word "hypocritical" used to describe Republican politicians like Sanford and Ensign, who supported the move to impeach President Clinton, allegedly because he cheated on his wife. But, as Wooten points out, Clinton was impeached not because he had an affair but because he lied about it under oath. The articles of impeachment did not accuse Clinton of infidelity. They accused him of committing perjury, obstructing justice and abusing power.

Technically, that is so. But it is also true that these things get confused in the public mind. We're long past the time in our history when being divorced was an obstacle to the White House, but infidelity remains a significant stumbling block.

Gary Hart's presidential ambitions were destroyed when the public learned of his relationship with Donna Rice. John Edwards may have been able to seek the presidency again in the future if not for revelations of his affair with a campaign staffer; he may still be able to do so someday, but it seems doubtful right now.

And other politicians — the most recent and most obvious examples being Mark Foley and Larry Craig — have seen their political careers ended by sex scandals. To be fair, Foley was not guilty of infidelity, but his scandal, like Craig's, was homosexual in nature — and it involved minors, which was hypocritical in its own way, considering that Foley waged a campaign, while in the House, against pedophiles.

Ensign's relationship may well be a subject for the people of his state to debate three years from now — that is when he is due to run for re–election. But Mark Sanford is barred by state law from seeking another term as governor in 2010. Unless he decides to seek another office, this is a matter that is between him and his wife and their four sons.

Nevertheless, the Spartanburg (S.C.) Herald Journal wasted no time in calling for Sanford's resignation. "Mark Sanford cannot navigate a deep and painful personal crisis and lead the state through its economic crisis at the same time," the newspaper wrote.

(To put things into perspective, the newspaper endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. It also endorsed George W. Bush when he sought re–election in 2004.)

Do you want to know what really concerns me in these matters? It isn't the fact that both Ensign and Sanford apparently violated their spouses' trust. I don't want to trivialize that. But I think it's something that is private.

The part that is public — and reflects poorly on their qualifications for the presidency — is their bad judgment. I think that is especially true of Sanford, who reportedly used taxpayer funds to travel to Argentina to be with his mistress.

It is appropriate for voters to assess the judgment of a politician. Whether it is Gary Hart insisting that reporters would be disappointed if they tried to catch him in the act (even though he knew they would not be) or Mark Sanford traveling to Argentina on the taxpayers' dimes, their actions speak volumes about their judgment.

I don't live in South Carolina so what Sanford does about the remainder of his term as governor does not concern me. But I am a citizen of the United States — and, as such, I am entitled to evaluate the judgment of any person who asks for my vote for the presidency.

In that regard, both Ensign and Sanford are far short of my standards.