The Fall and Rise of Mark Sanford

This is a story about redemption. Or maybe it’s about true love. It could be about hubris. There’s a very slight possibility it’s about dredging the port of Charleston.

But it’s probably just a story about how voters sometimes cast their ballots on nothing more than name recognition.

It begins last December, when South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a man devoted to Tea Party values of freedom and economic opportunity, resigns midterm to grab a high-paying job running the Heritage Foundation. Governor Nikki Haley then appoints Representative Tim Scott to fill DeMint’s Senate seat. This opens up Scott’s gig in Congress, which will be decided in a special election on May 7.

An open congressional seat is a rare and exciting thing and attracts a lot of rare and exciting candidates; a special election, with its shortened and hence more affordable campaign season, attracts even rarer and more exciting contestants. This being a heavily conservative district, 16 Republicans competed. On the Democratic side, known in these parts as “the side with no chance,” two people jumped in: some guy with absolutely no chance and Elizabeth Colbert (pronounced Col-bert) Busch, the sister of Stephen Colbert (Col-bear). That last name carries even more power down here, since their father (who let each kid choose how to pronounce the surname) was a well-respected doctor who helped expand the Medical University of South Carolina.

She is running against Republican-runoff winner Mark Sanford, the man who held this very seat from 1995 to 2001, before becoming governor in 2003, before being a much mentioned potential 2012 presidential candidate and before going dark for six days in 2009–his whereabouts unknown to his family, staff or law enforcement–when he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” before that phrase came to mean “cheating on my wife with a very sexy journalist in Argentina.”

Sanford managed to serve out his term, but just barely. “It would not take a rocket scientist to say politics was over for me,” he says, grinding extra salt onto his tortilla chips and sipping a Coke at a giant Mexican restaurant next to a highway in Hilton Head. “We take sinners out in body bags in South Carolina.” Then, he adds, “miraculously, this seat opens up in my district.”

It is an insane thing to do, to re-enter politics after public self-immolation. Sanford is not Bill Clinton or Anthony Weiner, who repented and somehow stayed married. This dude is still with his Argentine lover; they got engaged last summer. His ex-wife Jenny wrote a book about what an emotionally clueless, selfish, cheap phony he is. He has a disapproval rating of 56% in his district.

But Sanford, 52, long-faced, a little too tan, teeth a shade too white, his pleated khakis two decades out of style, is immensely charming. Like way beyond Bill Clinton charming. He asks just the right questions about you. His eyes water easily. He touches your arm in a way that doesn’t feel invasive. He is an Eagle Scout who is comfortable with those who make fun of Eagle Scouts. He lacks pretension to such a degree that when he orders, he asks the waitress for “something with chicken.” Most surprising, he projects honesty. His humility feels unfalse. Even at that surreal press conference where he explained what hiking the Appalachian Trail meant, he didn’t just apologize. He talked about true love and how “the odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to the heart.” More insane, he didn’t quit. He stayed for a year and a half, governing with his head down half the time in shame and confusion, getting censured and paying a $70,000 fine for questionable expenses involving trips to South America.

This is the rare election that can be decided by one vote. If Jenny, who still lives in Charleston, announced she was voting for him, he’d win easily. If she announced she wasn’t, it would all be over. Which is part of why he went, a few days before Christmas, to ask if she was interested in the seat herself. When she said no, he asked her to work for his campaign. She apparently thought that was as insane as you do now.

A former investment banker, Jenny ran her husband’s campaigns brilliantly and still advises Governor Haley. People thought Jenny might have run for governor herself, and some Republicans say she was offered the Senate seat before Scott was, though a GOP source close to Haley will say only that she was on the governor’s short list. Jenny had been saying she wouldn’t endorse anyone in this congressional race, which meant Sanford still had a chance. Until two weeks ago.

That’s when reporters found out that her lawyer had filed a complaint on Feb. 4 against Sanford for coming to her house–one he never lived in–to watch the second half of the Super Bowl with one of their sons. When Jenny wasn’t there. She came home and, in the backyard, excoriated him for repeatedly showing up uninvited. So now he’s got a court date with a family-court judge two days after the election and a 9-point deficit in the polls.

Worse yet, the National Republican Congressional Committee announced–to the press–that it was no longer funding Sanford’s run, probably figuring that if Colbert Busch wins, she’ll have little chance of defending that seat in 2014 against a Republican candidate who has never hiked any trails whatsoever.

It may be her first time running for anything, but Colbert Busch is running a solid campaign. She truly enjoys shaking hands, making small talk and saying one of four things: “get our fiscal house in order,” “cut waste,” “I’ve been a businesswoman for 25 years” or “I’ve got a lot of brothers and sisters, and I’m proud of all of them.” She takes down the phone numbers of kids who are into math and science and, after a day of fundraising calls, will call a few and ask if they’ve done their homework. She agreed to only one debate, on April 29, in which she talked a lot about the importance of dredging the port of Charleston. She can’t say much because even a phrase like “I work connecting alternative energy to the university I work at” contains two words that won’t go over well in a district that hasn’t been represented by a Democrat since 1981. And especially not in a special election, which typically has low turnout, and low turnout is never good for Democrats. So she’s issued statements about how Obama’s budget and the assault-weapons ban suck. She’s deleted tweets supporting gay marriage and abortion rights. She’s had brother Stephen do some fundraisers, but it’s likely that she doesn’t mention him too much because many of the district’s voters think he’s too left-wing.

I followed her around all day, from a speech to a farmers’ market to a business-leader-and–Pat Conroy lunch to a soft-shell-crab festival, and I can attest to the fact that she never said anything dumb. Or interesting. A smart, likable 58-year-old in a leopard-print car jacket with blown-out, highlighted hair and an easy laugh, she has her own tragic backstory she doesn’t use. Her first marriage was even worse than Sanford’s: her husband also wound up on TV, on America’s Most Wanted, for securities fraud.

Colbert Busch may have gotten nearly $800,000 from the Democrats, but Sanford’s campaign is much better. He puts out folksy ads with his cell-phone number in them. Many of his campaign signs are huge pieces of plywood he bought cheap or got from dumpsters, sloppily spray-painted in black with these words: SANFORD SAVES TAX $. Some have a piece of paper stapled to them reading SAY NO TO PELO$I. These are campaign signs of the Great Recession, implying that right beyond these beautiful South Carolina coastal roads is a squirrel-eating, Mad Max society so desperate, it is willing to turn to Mark Sanford to save it.

His other advantage is that he doesn’t have to struggle with name recognition. He’s not governor-famous; he’s E! channel–famous. He thought people would walk up to him during this campaign and tell him what a horrible philanderer and hypocrite he is, but here at the Mexican joint, it’s all warm support, as if South Carolina is populated solely by various incarnations of Oprah Winfrey. People, Sanford says, rarely bring up his scandal, and when they do, it’s to tell him about how everyone goes through hard times or to confess their own transgressions. It seems like the 56% who disapprove of Sanford in South Carolina are very polite about it in public. As a broken man who “cratered,” he says, he’s better at empathizing with people whose problems are different from his own. “I’m still a diehard conservative. But if I make it, I’m going to be far less strident in my advocacy of those beliefs,” he says. “This is real life. The problem with that past part of life is that you pretend to be perfect, and I pretend to be perfect, and we’re not having a real conversation.”

As governor, his diehard conservative credentials were just about perfect. He brought pigs into the House of Representatives in protest of the chamber’s 105 overrides of the 106 budgets he vetoed because of pork–and this was a Republican-dominated legislature. He was the first governor to turn down stimulus money. The Cato Institute ranked him as the nation’s top governor on its 2010 fiscal report card.

After his term as governor ended, he escaped the late-night jokes by moving to his 3,000-acre family plantation, where he built a pine cabin by hand. And kept his head down. “As a man, part of your worth is having the phone ring. People weren’t seeking your opinion on some matter. They weren’t returning your e-mail. The phone is dead,” he said of his year and a half on his own personal Walden. But recently the phone has started ringing: he’s become a contributor on Fox News and got work doing real estate deals again. I run into his sister Sarah, a former host of Outdoor Life Network programs, twice–at the farmers’ market and then again at the crabfest–and she tells me she advised him to run. “He had to go back to work. It’s what he does,” she said. “He’s one of the bravest guys I know. Who would go back?”

Maybe this guy. The one who looks up at every person walking past our table and, if they catch his eye for just one second, stands up and shakes their hand. “I always watch eyeballs. I don’t want someone to recognize me and for me not to pay the respect of talking to them,” he says.

He took his sons to a University of South Carolina football game, and they got annoyed that he kept stopping to take photos with people, keeping them from their seats, the game and their dad. “I told my boys, ‘I will stand taking pictures as long as anyone wants to take my picture. These people kept me in office. They’re what kept them from impeaching me.'” I ask if his boys were pleased with that answer. “They understood intellectually, I suppose. But there’s a difference between that and feeling it.”

Neither Jenny nor Mark Sanford will talk on the record about each other, because they don’t want to make this any worse than it already is on their children. And even if they did, it’s impossible to know what goes on in a successful marriage, much less a broken marriage, and way less a broken political marriage.

Much less two. A new group, Republicans for Colbert Busch, is being organized by Leslie Turner, who had an ugly divorce from Teddy Turner, who lost to Sanford in the primary. Politics in the Palmetto State is more tangled than a backyard of kudzu.

It’s easy to dismiss Sanford as a cad and his comeback as the by-product of a particularly narcissistic personality. But if he wins next week, it would hardly be the first time a politician long given up for dead mounted an impossible comeback. It’s overwhelmingly complicated–the allegations from exes, the fact that the blood-red low country would put a stained man’s unimpeachable conservative credentials up against a newcomer who’s famous for having a brother who mocks men with unimpeachable conservative credentials.

It’s all so confusing that I can see why people just vote for the name that’s most familiar.