EDITOR’S NOTE: After we sent this story to our printer Wednesday, former Gov. Mark Sanford suspended his campaign. But you should read the story anyway to see his thoughts about what’s happening in the country. And you might want to read what happened to cause us to add a new cover image to the online version of this story.
If you’re expecting to read anything salacious about former Gov. Mark Sanford in this story, you can stop reading. But you might want to continue reading to learn about the new twist to his Wizard of Oz path of public service.
This story focuses on why Sanford is running for Congress a third time — something that surprised many on March 30, which was the last day that candidates could file for the congressional seat that stretches from McClellanville through Charleston to Beaufort County.
Yep, Sanford is back, comfortable in a blue button-down shirt and jeans and driving an old Chevy Tahoe with hundreds of thousands of miles on it.
He’s more relaxed than the firebrand of 32 years ago elected on a term limits pledge and who kept his word and left Congress six years later. Same guy who then ran for governor, pulled a publicity stunt with pigs at the Statehouse to showcase pork-barrel spending and served eight years pushing fiscal accountability. By 2013, when then-U.S. Rep. Tim Scott was appointed to the U.S. Senate, Sanford won a special congressional election before losing a 2018 Republican primary.
“You don’t invest 25 years of your life, on and off again, if you don’t care,” Sanford said in a recent, extended interview with the Charleston City Paper. “And I care deeply about the financial trajectory of our country.
“I’ve got an audience of four who really matter to me. And my boys are going to get ripped if we stay on the course we’re on.”
In the next few days, Sanford will turn 66. His four “boys” are grown and he’s expecting his first grandchild. He’s also got an area delivery business with about 100 drivers with whom he spends a lot of time — and who teach him about everyday life that many Cole Haan Republicans don’t learn about.
So why’s Sanford running for a third stint in Congress? In short, because he wants the nation to wake up to the fiscal nightmare that is facing the country if it doesn’t get its mess together. Which is a similar message to what he’s been preaching for three decades. It’s just that things have gotten worse. A lot worse.
Deep navy in a sea of shades of MAGA red
Johns Island farmer Sidi Limehouse says he started urging Sanford to jump into the First Congressional District race back in October because he had more to offer in a nation swimming in debt. He figured that Sanford had been talking about fiscal issues for years. And now was the time people needed to hear more about it.
“I kept pestering him,” Limehouse said. “Finally, I got him to see things my way and run.”
Sanford said Limehouse called every week saying, “You’re over there on the sidelines. You ought to be back on the playing field because this is exactly what you’ve talked about.”
In the Republican-leaning First District, President Donald Trump is still relatively popular, particularly among MAGA zealots. The nine other GOP candidates in the June primary are various shades of MAGA red, all desperate to link their names, resumes, records and positions to Trump.
Sanford, who often seems more comfortable being an outsider with a libertarian streak, is not a MAGA candidate. If he were a color, it would be the deep navy of the George H.W. Bush era that represented fiscal conservatism — pay your bills, don’t borrow too much, have a strong defense and steer government toward local, not federal.
If you read between the lines of polling, more Americans seem to be talking quietly about these older financial values as Trump declines physically and politically.
An affordability crisis
These days, Sanford talks easily about something that confounds many Republicans and Democrats — the higher costs at the store, gas pump and apartment that threaten the American way of life.
“Historically, what’s killed off civilizations has been basically spending themselves into oblivion,” he said. “As you know, it wasn’t relevant when I was in Congress the first time. Back then, we were at a 30% debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio. Now, we’re at 120%.”
In fact in 1995 when Sanford first took office, the national debt — how much we owe as a country — was $5 trillion. Now, 31 years later? It’s eight times higher at $39 trillion. And every four months, it goes up another trillion to pay, in large part, for interest costs on the debt, national defense and retirement programs.
“We’re headed for an affordability crisis based on the way these things play themselves out at the end of a debt cycle in making things less affordable,” Sanford warned. “So we have asset inflation, but stagnancy at some standpoint of wages — and it puts the regular working person in a real squeeze.”
This affordability crisis is a byproduct of the looming debt crisis, which threatens the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s going to impact interest rates, he predicted “and when that impacts peoples’ mortgages, impacts their credit cards, impacts their car payment, there’s just a lot of real life stuff that’s tied to nobody looking at financial realism in Washington, D.C.”
What’s next
Sanford, who hopes his message and name recognition will help him get into a primary runoff, said if he were to win the First District seat in November, he would have the advantages of knowing the system, not having to learn it over a couple of years. It should make him more effective, he said.
“I mean, the relationships matter. There is perspective that matters. There’s no hood-winking.”
And if the U.S. House turned to Democratic control?
“You do get a bully pulpit, a microphone,” he said, pledging to use it to focus on returning the nation to fiscal sense. “I would use every tool in my toolkit as a member of Congress to try and raise and elevate this issue that is currently ignored in Washington, D.C.”
Sanford’s accomplishments
Land. During Sanford’s term as governor, the state set aside 287,000 acres for conservation.
Tax reform. Sanford started the push for income-tax reform that still goes on today. He helped to lead the effort to cut marginal business rates and to pass “the largest recurring tax cut in state history,” according to his website.
DMV. Sanford touts cutting the waiting time in lines at the state Department
of Motor Vehicles from 66 minutes
to 15 minutes.
Spending. In addition to being tough on legislative spending, he launched a blue ribbon commission to look at ways to save money and reshape state government, such as an effort that lawmakers still avoid today — removing unnecessary sales tax exemptions for special interests that costs billions of dollars of revenues to the state that could lower the sales tax rate.
Executive budget. Sanford said his governorship was the first to produce an operational executive branch budget — a tool that’s commonplace at the start of legislative sessions now.
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