In an interview with The Daily Beast, embattled South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford said that “everybody is assigned their own secret-agent mission in life” while reflecting on his political and personal missteps.
“At times the tricky part, the hard part, is finding out what that secret-agent mission is,” Sanford said. “Some of us do it early, some of us do it later in life.” He also describes himself as a “wounded soldier” who “took [himself] off the battlefield.”
The governor has been on a press binge in recent weeks, holding multiple press conferences to address growing impeachment rumors. He’s also no stranger to such self-reflection via the press, as he recently wrote in a guest column for South Carolina newspaper The State: “While none of us has the chance to attend our own funeral, in many ways I feel like I was at my own in the past weeks, and surprisingly I am thankful for the perspective it has afforded.”
Sanford is also dealing with new accusations from his opponents, who blasted the Sanford camp last week for allegedly planting a rumor that Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer is gay. Bauer would succeed Sanford as the state’s governor if he stepped down; he wrote a letter last week calling for his resignation.
Bauer’s letter was just the latest nail directed at Sanford’s political coffin: state senator David Thomas made waves in August by launching a probe of the governor’s travels using public money.
Despite the increasing number and ferocity of attacks, Sanford plans to remain in office for the rest of his term. “I’m going to keep doing the business that the people of South Carolina really care about,” he told The Daily Beast. “I can’t tell you how many people come up to me and say ‘this has got to be a three-ring circus; this has got to be a witch hunt. This is about David Thomas trying to run for Congress, and thinking he can build his name by having these ‘investigations’ that are little about investigation and a whole lot about making papers … What we are going to continue to try to do is, one, get back to business. At the end of the day, the subtleties of my relationship with Jenny are not going to impact one way or another somebody who lives in Sumter who is struggling to make it.”
