The jokes write themselves, of course.
“Mark Sanford’s favorite committee? Foreign Affairs, baby!”
“Haven’t you been watching the news? Suspicious disappearances are normal in the Senate.”
“For what purpose does the, uh, member from South Carolina rise?”
Ouch. And yes, there’s more where that came from.
See Clinton, Bill.
But here’s the thing: Former Congressman and Gov. Mark Sanford really is the best candidate running in the GOP primary to replace U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham on this November’s ballot.
In fact, it’s not even close.
Why? Because Sanford is a hedgehog in a field of foxes.
And with the U.S. debt set to soar past $40 trillion this year, a famously skinflinty hedgehog like Sanford is exactly what the Senate needs.
Wait. A hedgehog? In a field of…? What the fox?
Good question. In a famous 1953 essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers into two camps: foxes, who know many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing.
So, in a democracy like ours, the trick is knowing which one you need at any given moment. And right now, believe it or not, that’s the guy who found the Appalachian Trail … in Buenos Aires.
Because now, thanks to the truly bipartisan fiscal profligacy of the past 10 years, Mark Sanford is right about the one big thing he’s spent his entire political career talking about ad nauseam.
“I’m running for Senate because I believe our nation is at a financial tipping point,” Sanford said, entirely predictably, last week. “We can’t keep spending money we don’t have and expect good things to happen, and yet we’re on pace to add roughly a trillion dollars to the national debt over just the next 100 days.”
To put that number in perspective: When Barack Obama left office in January 2017, the nation’s total accumulated debt after 240 years of wars and social programs and tax cuts that didn’t pay for themselves was about $19 trillion. Now, just 10 years later, it’s more than doubled — with another trillion on the way before the turkey hits the table this Thanksgiving.
This is in a country with a total national income of $32 trillion.
So why should primary voters on Aug. 11 pick Sanford and not one of the other self-described conservatives in the race, like the late senator’s sister, Sen. Darline Graham, or U.S. Reps.
Ralph Norman and Russell Fry? Because Sanford’s sincerely monomaniacal obsession with deficits makes him the only one who means it enough to cross President Donald Trump when the chips are down and the president is direct-dialing his cell phone.
To wit: Norman and Fry both wound up voting to add more than $4 trillion to the debt last year when Trump demanded it with his so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Of course, we wouldn’t agree with all, or perhaps even most, of Mark Sanford’s solutions to the problem. In fact, we’re sure he’d vote to cut critical programs we support. But so, too, would his primary opponents. At least Sanford’s votes would be aimed at reducing the debt — not at financing one more round of tax cuts for the well-to-do.
So on Aug. 11, two cheers for the hedgehog. Jokes aside, he’s the fiscal hero we now need, if not the one we deserve — perhaps South Carolina’s last true fiscal conservative in today’s otherwise debt-happy and thoroughly MAGA-fied GOP.
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