Now the Huffington Post is taking some liberties here with Sanford’s statements to Real Clear Politics. The way Arianna and the gang spin, Gov. Sanford calls Rush Limbaugh an idiot, albeit inadvertantly. The governor doesn’t and it’s not because he doesn’t mention Rush by name when denouncing those who want Obama to fail. It’s because the interviewer doesn’t mention Rush at all. Was Rush in the interviewer’s mind when he asked the question? Who knows, but it’s likely. Was Rush on Sanford’s mind considering that the interviewer didn’t mention the radio host? Come on, guys, we’re talking about Mark Sanford here. It’s difficult enough trying to calculating Pi to the 10 gajillionth number and answer a question at the same, let alone to read into it that the question may or may not be about some ex-pill popper. Geez.
Here’s the original quesiton and Sanford’s full answer:
RCP: There’s this view that perhaps Republicans are rooting for President Obama to fail. What’s your reaction to that sentiment?
Gov. Sanford: You know, the first meeting we had there in Philadelphia, when the nation’s governors came and met with Obama, I stood in that room, and I said, “Look. I don’t want to disagree with you.” I sat there in the living room of our house, tears coming down my eyes, my four boys gathered with me, watching that speech he gave in Grant Park. His kids running out, his wife was there. And you thought about one of the ultimate sort of Horatio Alger stories in the history of politics. To think that he could pull off a win against the biggest Democratic fundraising machine that I think has ever existed. What he did was marvelous, in terms of just a human story.
And I said, “Man to man, I dont want to disagree with you on anything. And as an American, I absolutely want you to succeed. And therefore, as an American who wants you to succeed because we’re all in this boat together it’s incumbent upon me, if I think an idea is a bad idea, even though I don’t want to disagree, to lay it out.” And he said his say and I said my say and he said his say and I said my say, and we called it quits.
I don’t want him to fail. Anybody who wants him to fail is an idiot, because it means we’re all in trouble. But I do think, in that same vein, if you’ve looked at the pages of history, if you’ve looked at the pages of economic data that I’ve looked at over a long period of time — I’ve got a masters in business from the University of Virginia, I’ve worked up in New York in finance — if you’ve looked at that kind of stuff and you legitimately think that something ain’t going to work, you’d be cheating him and cheating yourself if you didn’t lay it out and call an ace an ace in terms of where you’re coming from.
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