Boys and their Favorite Toy

My gripe of the day was with Joe Scarborough, my second-favorite conservative, (the first being my father, who in his older age has moved to the right of Genghis Khan) and Mike Barnicle. They missed the mark about Mark Sanford. Yes, they are right, commentators may indeed be inordinately gleeful about Mark Sanford's self-immolation. And yes, as Willie Geist managed to point out, perhaps much of that glee comes from the irony and hypocrisy in yet another Values Voters poster child's inability to do as he would have the rest of us mere mortals do.

But the excerpt cited from one of Morning Joe's "Must-Read" Op-Eds, apparently meant to exemplify this collective cackle from the left, actually judges Sanford by the same standards Joe uses when Mika gets hinky about having to suffer the post-scandal Eliot Spitzer gladly. Joe's a pragmatist. He thinks Eliot's smart. He wants to hear what the man knows about finance. Remember once upon a time he took down those Wall Street muckity-mucks.

It's the good old, tried-and-true public/private divide: private blunders are supposed to have no bearing on public judgment—except when they do.

This seems to me exactly what Gail Collins is saying in her patented wry and dry and unsurprised way:

       The peculiar thing about the apologies was that    Sanford seemed to be under the impression that his worst dereliction of duty involved womanizing. I      think I speak for us all when I say that if a governor        wants to fly off for a rendezvous with his mistress,      the first rule should be: leave a phone number. If      you must flee to a love nest, make sure it’s one with    an Internet connection.

                                  "The Love Party," June 24, 2009

Now we can, of course, argue about whether Spitzer's shenanigans impinged upon his professional performance. We can always draw the line where Mika does when she gets tired of being painted as a prig: Spitzer broke the law. Governor Sanford did not, as far as we know. (Reporters are looking into this as I write.) President Clinton did not.

The problem with the parsing of this argument is that in Sanford's case the dichotomies do not hold—neither the one between the private and public spheres or that between legal and illegal acts. As academic types might say, there's some serious "slippage" going on.

Collins' riff on extramarital affair etiquette maps out where the private road to Argentina and the public road to political hell converge. It may be, that, as Mike Barnicle opined in his unfortunate homage to the patron saint of inappropriate and unmanageable male desire, Governor Sanford's heart wants what it wants. But when those wants compel a grown-up man with a grown-up job and grown-up responsibilities to behave like a teenybopper blowing off study hall, it is more than fair to question whether he possesses the minimum basic skills this grown-up job requires.

More than anything else, though, I would like to roll the tape of Sanford's press conference the next time I hear the tiniest peep about how women's hormonal excesses and emotional outbursts make them unfit for public service.