 |
Mark Sanford: The Next Dan Quayle? |
 |
On paper, Mark Sanford looks like a solid pick to be John McCain’s running mate. When McCain secured the Republican nomination back in February, the previously unknown Sanford emerged as one of the early VP frontrunners. He’s got all of the desirable ingredients:
1) He’s the governor of South Carolina, bringing balance to the ticket as a southerner and a Washington outsider (though he has served in the US House).
2) He’s quite popular in his home state, winning handily in two gubernatorial races.
3) He’s conservative enough, but not too conservative. This means that he’s anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage, which pleases the evangelical faction; but he’s also a proponent of budget cuts and small government, which makes the pro-business crowd happy.
4) At 48 years of age, he’s a contemporary of Obama’s and nicely balances out the age gap.
The only trouble is, if you take Sanford’s resume and replace the words “governor of South Carolina” with “junior Senator from Indiana,” you get Dan Quayle in 1988. And the choice of Quayle as Daddy Bush’s running mate could have cost the Republicans that election had the Democrats put up a more formidable opponent.
Two high-profile incidents - one comical and one more serious - threaten to characterize Sanford as a Quayle-like dim-witted bumbler who has no business being one heartbeart away from the presidency:
- On election day in 2006, he was turned away at the polls because he did not have his voter registration card. Further confusion was caused because he had a Columbia driver’s license but was trying to vote in his home district in Sullivan’s Island. Granted, we’ve all had mental lapses like this, but not as a major public figure heading for an important photo op.Â
- In mid-July, Sanford appeared with Wolff Blitzer on CNN and  was asked to distingush McCain’s economic policy from George Bush’s. His reply was downright embarassing, showing both a lack of poise and a lack of knowledge of the issue:
Given McCain’s own struggles with thinking on his feet, he certainly does not want a running mate that doubles the potential for embarassing gaffes. Sanford just might have knocked himself out of contention with this performance on CNN.
Now to be fair, Sanford is not a dim-witted bumbler. He is a skilled politician who has been quite succesful in the dog-eat-dog world of South Carolina politics. But elections at the state level don’t come under the same scrutiny and pressure as a national presidential campaign, and Sanford’s occasional mental lapses would give the Democrats more than enough firepower to brand him as unqualified to serve. If they’re smart, the Republicans will put his rising stock in the bank, and groom him for a future seat in the US Senate.
DISCUSSION
One RESPONSE to “Mark Sanford: The Next Dan Quayle?”