At our sister blog, Tom Schaller says no:
Is Sanford a cad for bolting his family on Father’s Day weekend? Of course, but that is a private, moral failing, rather than a failure of public duty. . . .
I [Schaller] oppose most of what Mr. Sanford stands for politically. His showy rejection of federal stimulus money targeted for his state was a crass publicity stunt designed to garner national attention for Mr. Sanford at the expense of his constituents, many of whom are struggling economically. . . . Should Mr. Sanford’s ambitions founder on the shoals of a personal scandal, however, yet another opportunity will be lost to establish the long-overdue separation between private comportment and public service. So here’s hoping he doesn’t resign or, if he does, it is a matter of personal choice rather than him bowing to political pressure.
I see where Schaller is coming from. Lots of people have complicated personal lives, and it’s not clear at all that these difficulties have much if anything to do with governing. But I don’t know if I agree with him on the wall of separation between private comportment and public service.
Consider the Sanford case. Schaller’s a Democrat, so he can evaluate Sanford on his policies. But if Schaller were a Republican, he might very well want Sanford out of there because he tarnishes the brand, makes the party a laughingstock, etc. Also makes it harder for Sanford to convincingly follow a “family values” agenda which Schaller (if he were a Republican) might want. These are legitimate concerns for a Republican to have. Even if you don’t think Sanford’s personal indiscretions are important, you might want him gone and replaced by a more effective Republican. Just as, from the other direction, a Democrat would’ve preferred a zipped-fly version of Bill Clinton.
But the first thing I noticed in Schaller’s otherwise excellent post were the ugly pie charts. Boy are they ugly. Damn! Some quick points:
– The wedges aren’t labeled directly. Instead, the reader has to go back and forth, back and forth, between the chart and the legend.
– The color schemes are a mess. The top graph goes from blue to purple to yellow to green??
– The responses are ordered, and the pie obscures this by being circular. For example, in the top graph, the natural order is More, Same, Less (with Don’t Know as a separate category); in the second graph, Yes, Not Sure, No.
– The goofy orientation of the second graph makes it hard to see that the blue area (“Yes”) is larger than the red area (“No”).
– On the plus side, the charts are reasonably sided (not too large, not too small), have clear titles, are unambiguously labeled, and are not tilted or 3-D (thus, areas actually do represent proportions).
These aren’t hard-and-fast rules. The real point is that it’s hard for me to just look at the pie charts and see what’s going on. There are too many colors, legends, numbers, etc., floating around. When all is said and done, I guess the charts aren’t horrible, but they’re the graphical equivalent of meandering, hard-to-follow paragraphs.
Politically, I think Schaller is right. You only have to look at what happened in the 90s in the UK when John Major's Back to Basics campaign was interpreted as a campaign for moral values. The newspapers took this as carte blanche to reveal the discressions of any and every Tory MP, who then felt obliged to resign. That doesn't lead to effective government.
Unfortunately for the press, they missed the biggest scandal, of major's own affair with Edwina Currie.
My position is that in normal circumstances, private failings such as that are irrelevant except where
(i) they allow it to impact their job perfomance OR
(ii) to remain in the job would be hypocritical based on positions they have taken in regard to similar failings in others.
In both cases, Sanford must clearly resign – he's an outrageous hypocrite who was also so irresponsible as to be completely uncontactable for many days while active as governor.
He fails on both counts and must resign.
Schaller's a Democrat? That's why he doesn't want Sanford to resign. He's a gift to the Democrats that keeps on giving.
I don't care about private sexual behavior. It isn't on the radar as an issue for me. The decisions about S. Carolina are also out of my region. That said, Sanford called for Clinton to resign because of his moral standard, which if we were to rank hypocrisy levels would put him a notch or two below Spitzer, who prosecuted the act he did, but above the usual politician getting laid on the side. The nature of hypocrisy might be a useful inclusion.
My issue with Sanford has nothing to sex. He left the state without telling anyone in complete dereliction of his sworn oath of office. That's impeachable. It may not be enough to convict but that by itself is impeachable. Put it this way: imagine he'd checked himself into a mental hospital for a week and didn't want people to know. The outrage would possibly be more – I'd bet that – because people don't want an unstable, perhaps mentally ill governor. They'd reach this conclusion because he went to a mental hospital, but the act of dereliction is the same and I think people are not focusing as much on that act because of the salaciousness of the sex. But imagine a person running off, leaving his family on Father's Day, violating an agreement he had with his wife about ending this affair – would you think that person was stable? And if that person is the state governor who has sworn an oath that he has also violated?
I think this is a neat example of the way the phrasing affects responses. Write it up as a series of questions designed to highlight the dereliction and the instability or as a series that highlights the affair.
There's a deeper problem with Schaller's analysis than the one you point out. He assumes that the only reason someone might want Sanford to resign is an ethical problem:
I think it's very likely that a lot of South Carolinians want him to resign because they think he will now be an ineffective governor.
I agree with Jonathan – the fact that he had an affair is irrelevant, and is actually distracting people from the main issue, which is that he went someplace and didn't tell anyone. It seems like if he'd gone to play golf (or drive diggers) people would not be so distracted, and would focus on the dereliction of duty issue.