Staying True (6 page)

FIVE

A
S A CHILD IN CHICAGO, WE SULLIVANS WERE FANS OF THE Cubs, but when push came to shove, we were Braves fans through and through. My father, mom’s brother (my Uncle Tom), and a few of their friends owned the Milwaukee Braves long before owning baseball teams was profitable. When the team became the Atlanta Braves and even after the team was sold, we continued to think of them as our home team; we cheered for them over the Cubs any time they were in town.

We Sullivans also, of course, had brand loyalty to Skil products. We steered clear of all things Black & Decker.

As I got older, I understood loyalty to be the intangible thing on display between siblings and cousins—I had so many living nearby that it seemed we were one big mutual fan club. What an incredible gift it was to have such a supportive family clan, a ready and reliable cheering squad for any and all of us. I think I also understood that loyalty was at the root of good marriages. I could see that my parents were unfailingly loyal to one another, as were both sets of grandparents. This was not blind loyalty, but the kind of support that comes from knowing another person deeply, having committed to helping them succeed in life, and loving them warts and all.

It was not until Mark decided to enter politics, however, that I felt profound loyalty in my own bones and recognized it would be essential to our marriage and our goals.

That first intense congressional campaign was such an uphill challenge that it seemed to others, and sometimes to me, that the effort was hopeless, a pointless quest that could never end in victory. In many ways, the hopelessness of his quest was irrelevant to him. Mark was an ideologue with strong beliefs and a sense of urgency for change that would not be stilled. He saw this run at government office as a chance to inform others of the risks of debt and deficits. Whether he won or not, he hoped to change the public discourse on these issues. This, he felt, was an undertaking that would satisfy his need to be challenged intellectually and that would give him the exhausted thrill that comes with a job well done and a battle well fought. Simply put: The prospect of running a different kind of campaign, one based on principles and values, energized him. When Mark put his real estate business in the hands of a partner so he could focus full-time on the campaign, I knew he was serious.

Mark and I understood that as a complete political unknown, he would have trouble raising money. To get started, however, we needed some base capital. We decided to loan our campaign $100,000 of our own money—money we had earned and saved and some I had inherited—so we could compete with the better-financed opponents.

Our strategy was to raise as much money as possible and spend very little of it until the end of the race when most regular folks were deciding who would get their votes. Our first big expense was campaign stationery, which we used to write to anyone we had ever known asking for contributions. This included old friends and people we had worked with. My father showed his support by writing his friends as well. Many sent us money despite our slim chance of success, and we were grateful for every dime we received. Others honestly told us why they could not support us. We were surprised that some ignored our requests altogether. At least, we thought, we had discovered who our real friends were.

Mark created his campaign headquarters—my office—by building a wall to partition off part of our garage. He dragged an old carpet and a few folding tables from the barn at Coosaw to furnish the windowless space. It is an understatement to say that this office was not glamorous! I think we had two phones, and it seemed terribly sophisticated that I could answer the lines from phones upstairs in the house as well.

Mark’s sister Sarah was our sole volunteer in charge of signs (often homemade), and she walked any parade Mark and I could not make on our own. We had a few loyal volunteers who came to help lick envelopes or map neighborhood routes for Mark to knock on doors. Mark ordered a whopping two hundred bumper stickers and six large road signs, a meager amount, of course, to cover any congressional district. He treated those bumper stickers as if they were made of gold. He would only let someone have one if Mark was permitted to follow that person to their car to make sure the sticker made it onto the bumper.

Mark traveled the district (still in that stick-shift hatchback), meeting with Republicans, speaking to rotary groups and church groups, and attending fish frys and candidate forums whenever he could. I learned his positions on the issues and spent lots of time writing out answers to the questions each newspaper and interest group sent to us. Mark would then review the answers and tweak them if needed. I would ultimately type out the final responses on Mark’s little Apple Macintosh computer and fax or mail them out to the world. In addition to learning of Mark’s beliefs in depth, I respected the fact that he wanted to share his thoughts on an issue honestly and earnestly instead of giving the standard political sound-bite answer we were accustomed to hearing. We used this same careful attention when fielding questions on the phone.

On the weekends and many weekdays, Mark set out from our home early in the morning to knock on doors. We decided that he should focus his attention on mostly conservative, Republican districts with people who were more likely to be sympathetic to his message of cutting back government spending and government intrusion in our lives.

Mark wasn’t just a deficit hawk on the stump; he also lived that message in the running of the campaign. By February 1994 we had added $19,100 of contributions to our account book yet had spent only $786. Mark’s opponents had spent more than $100,000 by that point in the campaign. Though penny-pinching was his nature, Mark seemed to understand that unless we paid attention to every precious dollar, we would easily and quickly be bled dry. There was constant pressure to purchase ads in Republican newsletters or in the local newspaper to keep up with what other candidates were doing. Mark impressed upon me the importance of remaining disciplined, and I followed his lead by managing expenses carefully in the office.

The press pays very little attention to those they think are fringe candidates, and they had lumped Mark in with that crowd. If people think you can’t win, many won’t show up to volunteer or give you money, even if they warm to your message. This forced us to think more creatively about ways to draw attention. Free press was all we could afford. As he walked door-to-door, Mark started handing out fake billiondollar bills and told the voters he believed Congress was spending our hard-earned tax dollars as if they were “funny money.” This clever stunt brought a bit of welcome and free media attention, but not enough to gain the notice of power players within the Republican Party.

As it happens, even if you are on the same Republican team, sometimes you are not the right kind of Republican or perhaps you have not paid your dues within the party establishment. This seemed to be the case with Mark—no one within the party thought he had yet earned the right to this competition. He repeatedly drove two hours to speak to a monthly gathering of Republicans in Myrtle Beach, only to be told by the same woman in charge that she couldn’t find time to fit him into the agenda. Mark’s ideas were part of the Republican Party’s stated ideals, and yet somehow the establishment considered him an outsider, not loyal enough to represent the party or its cause.

Mark’s message encompassed term limits, too. He didn’t want to become a career politician and was wary of those who did. He believed that we should return to the model our country was founded on: a citizen legislature where ordinary people served for a while and then went back to being regular citizens who had to live under the laws they helped to create. He announced he would limit his own tenure, if elected, to just three terms or a total of six years. He also thought that political action committees gave incumbents an unfair advantage, so he refused to take any money from them. If all candidates restricted themselves in these ways, he believed, we’d get more common-sense decisions from our representatives about taxes and the spending of our money. In standing up and offering to limit his own term, Mark set himself apart from the other candidates who may have pledged to support term limits in general, but would not commit to limiting their own.

I think anyone following this congressional race would have been impressed by Mark’s integrity, even if they didn’t share his political views. I was fully immersed in the day-today running of the campaign and of caring for our two young sons (while Marshall had been a very content baby and a good sleeper, Landon had terrible colic and his restless sleep made both Mark and I exhausted in a not very satisfying way!), but even I found time to be impressed. Mark seemed to be hitting his adult stride, and it was an amazing thing to witness.

After spending seven-and-a-half months knocking on doors, driving to every event in the district, handing out fake money, speaking at forums, putting up signs, and handing out bumper stickers, we got hard numbers on how difficult it is to become known without spending money to get out a message. The local paper did a poll of likely voters six weeks before the primary, and Mark Sanford came in fifth out of a field of seven with only two percent support. We found this incredibly disheartening, though not unexpected. I remember asking Mark if all this effort really was futile, but he remained steadfast. Our media campaign was about to begin over July 4 weekend, and that was when we hoped our message could really begin to penetrate.

I continued to draw strength from an increasingly clear sense of Mark’s positions on all the issues and also from that elusive thing called loyalty. I had Mark’s back, and I got my back up when I found something had been said or written about him that I felt was wrong. If a reporter twisted the truth, I couldn’t sleep until I had set the record straight. In response to an article I found completely misleading, for instance, I sent this rather scathing letter to the editor of the
Post and Courier
. It was printed on July 20, 1994:

No Campaign Deficit

The word “deficit,” as defined in the dictionary, means the amount by which a sum of money falls short of the required amount. Deficit spending refers to the practice of spending funds in excess of income, something our federal government does every day. My husband, Mark Sanford, is running for Congress because he is frustrated with the way our government is spending money and the way it is not making common-sense decisions on a variety of fronts. His bumper stickers, signs and stationery all have a “reduce the deficit” logo on them. I was shocked, then, to read an incorrect report in your paper today that Mark had “rung-up” a “deficit” in his campaign.

Mark’s campaign has never run a deficit and never will. To date, it has taken in $203,740 and spent $127,885, leaving a cash surplus of $75,854. Maybe your reporter studied accounting at the same school as most of our politicians. Mark has never run for office before, but he decided to run for Congress because he feels so strongly that regular folks, not people closely tied to the political system, need to get involved in government. It is crucial to our future and to that of our children to change the way things are done in our federal government and to start getting decisions from Congress that make sense again.

Mark strongly feels that we all need to stand up for what we believe in. That’s why Mark—a “political newcomer,” as your paper calls him—has invested money in his own campaign as he would do in any business transaction as well. In addition, he’s raised more than $103,000 from individuals who agree with his message of change, more than a dollar for every dollar he’s invested himself, hardly “financing most” himself as your paper states. What’s wrong with standing up and doing what you believe is right?

Mark believes in campaign finance reform, and instead of just saying he favors legislation that does away with PACs, he has himself refused to take a dime from any political action committee. Mark doesn’t just support term limits; he has taken the first step by limiting his own.

Mark is a man of honesty and integrity who doesn’t believe in politics as usual or in political rhetoric. I am proud of Mark and of everything he has done in his campaign to date. We need lots of Mark Sanfords in our government and maybe in journalism too.

Jenny Sanford
16 Wentworth Street