Mark Sanford is nice

Our Governor, the one that four years ago Time magazine named one of the five worst governors in the country, has sure been busy lately.
Not busy trying to solve our state’s unemployment problem, economy problem, education problem, budget problem, teen pregnancy problem, or any of the myriad of other problems affecting us.
Nope.
Governor Mark Sanford, a sweetheart of a guy if you ever get a chance to meet him, has spent most of the first quarter of 2009 on cable television trying to save our troubled, failing state from being helped by the federal government.
He’s been protecting us on CBS’s “Early Show” and CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” and some other show with John King. He went slumming on the NBC family of liberal networks, appearing on MSNBC’s “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” and “Morning Joe,” as well as CNBC’s “Street Signs.”
But the Governor appears to believe the Fox News network and its slate of journaltainment programs have the best chance of saving us from ruin. Just since January he’s been on “Fox News Sunday,” “Hannity,” “America’s Newsroom,” “Geraldo at Large,” “Cavuto,” “Glenn Beck,” and “Fox Business.”
And those are only the appearances the Governor’s media kids found fit to post on his YouTube page. Remember this one? You won't find it on the Sanford channel:


I didn’t have the stomach or the time to seek out every instance of Sanford’s media blitz against the federal stimulus bill, which also includes an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal and a guest spot on “Ugly Betty.” I was too busy waiting in line at the unemployment office – excuse me, the South Carolina Employment Security Commission’s Workforce Center. You see, our state’s unemployment rate is now the second highest in the country at 10.4 percent, behind only Michigan at 11.4 percent, so the lines can be pretty long.
In fact, since January 2008, South Carolina’s unemployment rates increased faster than any other state – a total of 4.7 percentage points by January 2009.
What has Gov. Sanford done about it? What have our state legislators done about it? I have no idea. I wish they’d tell me.
The only thing Gov. Sanford appears to be doing is talking on TV.
He’s become the voice of the tiny minority of six or so governors – all Republicans – who have fought against the federal government’s stimulus money coming to their state unless they can decide how to spend it.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the guy for a moment there, until he sounded like a dumber version of Howdy Doody/Kenneth the page delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s address to Congress a couple weeks ago. So, now it’s our boy Sanford’s turn on the stage – a former Goldman Sachs/Wall Street guy everybody thinks is just posturing because it will look good on his conservative resume when he decides to run for President in 2012.
Not so, says Mark.
“I’ve got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this type of thing,” he told the Associated Press.
By “doing exactly this type of thing,” he means doing nothing but talking about how the government should do nothing. He’s basically a libertarian, like Ron Paul, but with a little less Crazy-Eye.
Sanford believes we should just sit back and let the business people figure it out for us. We can trust those guys on Wall Street to save us.
“The best bailout of the American economy is an unfettered entrepreneur,” Sanford said on one of his recent cable appearances. Kind of like Bernie Madoff was unfettered, I guess.
“The ultimate in stimulus is people going out and working each day, starting a business, dreaming about starting a business, working within a business,” he said. And that would be great, but 10.4 percent of his constituents can’t do anything but the dreaming.
As conservative columnist David Brooks pointed out following Jindal’s awful national speech, the no-government-is-good-government ideology is the wrong plan of attack for the Republicans during this current financial crisis.
“The idea that the federal government has no role in this, in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to do stuff… to ignore all that is just a form of nihilism,” said Brooks.
Our frugal governor may just continue to ignore it because he has bigger things on his mind – like selling the family’s home, a modest, simple little shelter on Sullivan’s Island with six bedrooms and five toilets for $3.5 million.
Imagine trying to do that in this market. Somebody better set aside a little bailout money for the Sanfords.