Staying True (7 page)

As I re-read that letter now, I can remember the visceral feeling, the buzz, that the campaign gave to those close to it. I can also remember well the exciting momentum that started to build once we went on the air with ads. Many seemed to like Mark’s fresh face on television, and some recalled reading of his term limits pledge or meeting him when he knocked on their door. When the paper ran another poll on July 31, just over a week before the primary, Mark had jumped to fourth place with fourteen percent in the polls, an incredible jump in a very short time. Mark’s candidacy started to really take off, and our garage campaign office finally had a real group of volunteers.

Although Mark began this campaign with his thirty-page paper on debt and Social Security, we learned all too soon how the press can take long, thoughtful answers to questions on issues and reduce them to sound bites, often twisting their meaning, intentionally or otherwise. We also learned that there will always be some reporters against whom we never had a chance: For whatever reason, they were intently against Mark and his candidacy. This phenomenon became abundantly clear when Mark answered a question for the newspaper in Myrtle Beach, one that is distributed in a significant part of the district he sought to represent in Congress. The issue was about roads.

In the historic city of Charleston, there are many who would like to close off the city and keep tourists from entering, the feeling being that if we were to build more interstates heading here we might as well make them one-way as no one will want to leave once they get here. Myrtle Beach could not be more different. They want more roads built to bring more tourists and more revenue.

Mark answered the Myrtle Beach paper’s question: If there was a huge federal bill filled with billions of wasteful spending and dozens of bridges to nowhere, but it had a small sliver of money for building roads in Horry County and Myrtle Beach, would he vote for it? Staunchly against unnecessary spending, Mark said he would have to vote against that bill. The reporter printed that Sanford “would vote against roads” in the area, implying Mark was against any road funding.

This created a firestorm so large that we had to spend precious resources defending Mark’s position. When Mark personally confronted the reporter about why Mark had been quoted out of context, the writer looked at Mark and replied “life is out of context.” It was as though he was as astounded at Mark’s and my ire as we were with his journalism. He seemed jaded. Mark and I were much less so back then.

As the primary election drew closer and we started rising in the polls, we experienced the ugly underside of politics more specifically. I had heard of dirty tricks before in our state, but nothing prepared me for just how downright mean the sport of politics could be here. We became the subject of mystery calls to voters, otherwise known as push polls, in which a phony group such as “Citizens on Behalf of Fairness in the Media” calls and asks the innocent voter a question that implies something about a candidate that simply isn’t true.

The push poll call is designed to plant damaging associations in a voter’s mind that will cause him or her not to vote for the candidate who is the subject of the call. South Carolina is famous for this particular dirty trick. Our state was the place where unknown operatives helped to derail John McCain’s 2000 effort to become president by asking unsuspecting voters if they knew McCain had an illegitimate black child. The McCains had adopted an orphan from Sri Lanka, an act of pure generosity of spirit, but the push poll made him sound like a philanderer. For Mark, the implied accusation was a lot milder, but still very damaging to Mark’s candidacy if it were true, which it was not. The caller asked: “If you learned that Mark Sanford was a good friend of Bill Clinton … would you support him?” (Needless to say, being a friend of Bill Clinton’s was not a good thing in a Republican primary.) We also experienced the impact of special interest groups who send out voter guides, sometimes entirely honest and other times crafted in a manner to highlight a specific favorite candidate over others with similar views on the issues.

Looking back now, I see how this was just the first taste of something we would be forced to swallow again and again in each of Mark’s campaigns. I look around at the political landscape today and I can still see dirty politics on display at every turn. It was a great place to be in life and in our lives together that we could still be outraged and baffled by these things. I am no less outraged today, but I am no longer at all surprised.

I was personally exhausted as the primary drew to a close, but I have to admit we were also having fun. We had great new friends in our volunteers; we shared enthusiasm and a mission. Doing more with less was part of every aspect of the campaign. Volunteers would color large stickers to attach to our six road signs with short messages that would make them come alive, messages like “Just Three Terms” or “No PAC Money.” We also had our small team of volunteers shake signs at the base of the Ravenel Bridge or at busy intersections, all designed to give the illusion of widespread excitement and energy. Whether Mark won or not, we both believed we had run a campaign to be proud of. We shared a sense of purpose and that was exhilarating. For the first time since I had known him, Mark was completely and fully absorbed in something that seemed to satisfy his restlessness, which made me happy to see.

Life as a mom, however, was quite a juggle during this time. Thankfully Landon’s colic had passed and he was sleeping full nights, but nonetheless I was stretched thin. I was in the campaign office most of the day while someone watched the boys so I could oversee all activities in the basement office. I would break for lunch with the boys and would somehow squeeze in grocery shopping or time for a well-check at the pediatrician or some other such family necessity.

The boys were now two and almost one years old, and they were able to travel with me to campaign events or to TV stations. They were a draw when we shook hands in the parade at the Hell Hole Swamp Festival or when we went to the Chicken Bog Fest in Loris. But they were still very small, they needed their sleep, they needed routine, and they needed their parents’ attention. Truth to tell, my loyalties were torn as the campaign heated up. I wanted to do a good job with the campaign, but I also wanted to raise my boys well and to love them fully, and there was not enough time in the day to do both. However, my belief that God always seems to put the right people in your life at the right time was soon rewarded. Our house was down the street from the College of Charleston, where my favorite sitter (one who didn’t mind Landon’s screams) was a student. She moved in with us as the primary neared, which allowed me to work long into the evenings after I’d put the boys to sleep. Having someone I trusted to keep them safe and to be on call for them helped put my mind at ease as we carried on.

As the August 9 primary date approached, I felt as if we were running on adrenaline. Even though I was swept up in the momentum and excitement, I was ready for this endeavor to be behind us. There are many times in life when one feels completely out of balance and this was one of them. I had a purpose then, and it was to fully support Mark’s candidacy while balancing the needs of our young family. Fulfilling this purpose was satisfying but doing this well left no time for me, no quiet time for personal growth or reflection or to recharge my batteries. I know I was growing as a person through the testing of our values and through my deepening knowledge of my husband but I couldn’t keep this frenetic pace indefinitely. As with so many difficult things in life, I found this time was made easier because I knew there was an end that was clearly in sight.

On primary night, we gathered joyfully with close friends, family, and campaign volunteers at a local cafe. I was dressed in my red-white-and-blue campaigning attire from that day, with Landon on my hip in onesie pajamas and a pacifier in his mouth. Marshall sported Barney pajamas and red tennis shoes. He waved flags and ate cake, all way past his normal bedtime.

We watched the results come in on television, knowing that it would be close. If no candidate earned more than fifty percent, there would be a runoff election in two weeks for the first- and second-place candidates. We expected Van Hipp to come in first, as he was the frontrunner and the political establishment candidate. Our focus was on the pack of candidates vying for second place. We knew we were outspent by more than two to one by two or three of the candidates, yet we believed our disciplined and incredibly focused campaign still stood a hair of a chance. We were quite literally in shock when, with ninety-nine percent of the votes counted, the results were as follows:

The news reports that night and the following morning described “an electoral Cinderella story” and talked of Mark as a “giant killer,” likening him to David from the David and Goliath story. The press was suddenly enchanted with Mark, describing how he “came from nowhere” to win his spot in this runoff. Clearly, they had missed all our hard work! We were exhausted and elated, tired but victorious. And the battle had somehow just begun.

Swept up in a tornado of our own making, we realized that we had to raise more money immediately, film new ads, and work even harder, smarter, and somehow faster to get our message out. Mark was still very much the underdog, but the momentum was on our side. As this was a very conservative district, the odds were good that if he won this runoff election he would be able to win the seat in the general election. Having said that, if he won, we would have yet another exhausting campaign for the election in November. I got tired just thinking of it.

This part of the campaign was different because it was so intense, being squeezed into just two weeks. Van Hipp came out swinging. He described Mark as liberal, a real taboo in a conservative primary. We suspected that Van Hipp was financing more push polls. Implying it was Mark’s position on the issue, callers asked voters things such as, “Would you vote for Mark Sanford if you knew he favored legalization of drugs?”

Mark got so riled up by this that he went to Hipp’s house in the middle of the night to confront him. When Van opened the door clad only in his boxers, Mark stuck a tape recorder in his face and demanded that he state whether he was behind the calls or not. Van was undaunted by this confrontation. He denied funding the polls, and we couldn’t prove that he was doing so. And misinformation-filled mailings to voters continued: literature saying that Mark Sanford was “pro-abortion” and that he was “for universal health care” though neither was true.

Mark and I found these tactics colossally discouraging, and we vowed we would always run our campaign honorably, never saying something through the campaign medium we were not comfortable saying directly to the opponent. We wanted to change the terms of the debate, to actually have a debate of ideas without getting into the politics of personal destruction. At the end of the day, we believed, people liked honorable men and women in government and if we remained loyal to our values, voters would see Mark in this light. At this moment in the campaign, I understood my value to Mark was much higher than just the fact that I was “free.” If Mark had spent money to hire a campaign manager, not only would he have used precious resources, but he would likely have been strongly advised to respond to negative attacks in kind, thus compromising those values that I knew were so important to us both.

Unbelievably—to many, even to us—Mark won fifty-two percent of the vote in the runoff primary. What an upset! It seemed to us that the stars were aligning, and the shot in the arm that this win gave both Mark and his campaign staff would be the fuel for most of our future confidence. We celebrated heartily with volunteers and friends and family on election night and my happiness and my pride and my excitement was real. Yet I couldn’t wait for the festivities to end so that I could get to sleep. But of course, the activity never stopped. We were immediately swept into the next race for the general election.

This time the Republican Party was united behind Mark. We were one of the hopefuls that would be part of a Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives, and all eyes were focused on winning against our Democratic opponent, Robert Barber. Fundraising was much easier as the national party sent other politicians such as Dick Armey and Jack Kemp down to star at events and help raise more money. People came out of the woodwork to volunteer or to offer their advice or their services. Suddenly the campaign had outgrown the space we had available in our garage, so when a supporter offered to provide us with an office down the street from our house, we moved to more professional environs.

As the campaign expanded rapidly, I tried to step down as campaign manager. The general election felt quite different from our grass roots, ideological efforts at home. More was at stake and the effort was bigger and less personal than when we were working just to get Mark through the primary. I wanted to return to being a mom, but our media consultant pleaded with me not to, as he didn’t want us to fix what wasn’t broken. Mark understood that I wanted to step back and he understood why, but he begged me to stay on. We had made it this far together, he reasoned, and we had been a winning formula.