A Comparison of Mark Sanford and Bill Clinton

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who recently admitted to marital infidelity, had voted in favor of impeaching Bill Clinton when he was a U.S. Representative because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Predictably, liberals are calling him “hypocritical.” They are wrong.

First of all, liberals, like many people, often confuse hypocrisy with inconsistency. Hypocrisy suggests insincerity because it means making a show of virtue, which is not the same as failing to live up to one’s own standard. It is necessarily judgmental, therefore, to call someone a “hypocrite,” for although it is easy to observe an inconsistency, it is more difficult to judge someone’s motivations.

In the case of Sanford, it is not even necessary to judge whether his actions were inconsistent because Clinton was not impeached for marital infidelity, but for perjury and obstruction of justice. Perjury (i.e. lying under oath) is a crime inconsistent with an office for which an oath is required in order for it to be held. Unlike Clinton, Sanford is not facing a civil trial for sexual harassment in which he was questioned under oath about his pattern of behavior, and has been cooperative with the investigation.

Both Clinton and Sanford abused their office. Clinton used his physical office (the Executive Mansion) in order to commit adultery, but he also abused his office in the sense that his affair was conducted with a subordinate. Worse, he gave his mistress a federal job in order to remove her from the White House discretely and keep her quiet. In short, Clinton’s affair was far from a “private matter,” as his defenders contended. Sanford used official trips to conduct his affair, regardless of whether any by public money were spent on his dalliance. Like Clinton, Sanford was dishonest about it, although not under oath in a civil trial. Sanford was incommunicado on his trip, which was irresponsible, although not as critical as a presidential escape from the Secret Service (such as John Kennedy did in order to commit adultery). Sanford, like Clinton, could have been blackmailed. Indeed, in Clinton’s case, his mistress testified that his phone conversations were being subjected to eavesdropping by a foreign government, an averment he never denied. Blackmail of a public official is a temptation for that official to commit financial impropriety.

Unlike Clinton, Sanford admitted to infidelity. Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, Clinton never admitted to infidelity. All he admitted to, even after the DNA evidence proved his adultery, was that he had had “an inappropriate relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. The phrase, “an inappropriate relationship,” like Clinton’s statement on PBS as a candidate for president about his affair with Gennifer Flowers while he was Governor of Arkansas, that he had “caused pain” in his marriage, necessarily admitted no adultery, but allowed the listener to read into Clinton’s statement what the listener wanted to hear, just like many of Clinton’s political statements, which is the modus operandi of a con man. Although many of Clinton's defenders categorized his abuse of his public office and his perjury as a “private matter” that was not reflective of his public performance, they missed the point that if Clinton would lie under oath about a matter as supposedly insignificant as a sexual harassment case, he could not be trusted to tell the truth on more significant matters because in both cases, he was foremost concerned with his popularity above anything else.

It is noteworthy that Clinton campaigned in 1992 on the basis that his marriage was strong after his aforementioned supposed admission of adultery on PBS. A video about the strength of his marriage was prominently featured at the Democratic National Convention. In other words, Clinton's marriage was not a private matter, but something about which to boast publicly when it was policitally expedient to do so, but it became a private matter once it was not expedient to do so when Clinton's lie was exposed. It is an unanswered question as to whether Clinton was the one who was hypocritical in 1992, or whether he suddenly lapsed back to philandering in the late 1990s once Monica Lewinsky stepped into the Oval Office. Regardless, the American people were either deceived by candidate Clinton, or the premise upon which he was elected later became false, and Clinton deceived them at the time of its discovery by lying about it. In contrast, Sanford's affair appears to have begun after his election, which was not as clearly based upon a premise of marital fidelity in the first place.

The reactions of the wives of Clinton and Sanford are different, with Mrs. Clinton publicly standing by her husband and Mrs. Sanford publicly rebuking him, but their reactions are irrelevant. Many of Clinton's defenders excused his adultery because his wife did not appear to be angered relatively by his infidelity, but the degree of the moral wrong of adultery does not depend upon the degree to which a spouse feels victimized.

In conclusion, although Clinton's behavior was far worse than Sanford's, both men's behavior was wrong and unbecoming of a public official. However, Sanford was neither hypocrical nor inconsistent to have voted to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice. Indeed, Sanford would have been right to vote the way he did even if he had been adulterous at the time of the impeachment vote, for lesser federal officials had been impeached and removed from office for perjury, a fate which Clinton should have shared regardless of any imperfections of anyone who oppsed him.