Former SC Gov. Mark Sanford Gives Hannity Viewers Tips To ‘Fireproof’ Their Marriage
Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has mostly evaded the spotlight since a scandalous affair that found him flying to South America while his staff thought he was in Appalachia, gingerly tiptoed back into the spotlight in an extended interview with Sean Hannity last night. Sanford, clearly remorseful, put the blame of his failed marriage squarely on himself, ruled out any return to politics, and gave viewers advice on how to avoid temptation.
Despite it being, for the most part, a personal interview, Hannity didn’t let Sanford get away with easy answers to his questions, most of why revolved around the why of throwing away a perfectly good political career for an extramarital affair. For Sanford, the scandal was about “the reality of our own humanity,” and he said he didn’t think it “particularly constructive to look at the might-have-beens of life,” so having as high as presidential aspirations behind him wasn’t so much a problem. The biggest lesson he learned, he told Hannity, was not to point and laugh at the disgraced politicians in the paper: “I now say ‘there but for the grace of God go I.'”
Sanford clarified that he had no political aspirations whatsoever because the experience taught him that politics wasn’t his calling. “As important as that was, that wasn’t my calling in life,” he noted, “my calling in life is to seek God’s kingdom… to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” This formed most of the advice he gave, noting that “I got my priorities wrong” by putting work over family. He refused to get into too much detail, though also, to some extent, defended his affair, arguing that he did not have a “mistress”– “the word mistress connotates a financial level of support of which there was none” and chalking up the failure to falling “in love with somebody I shouldn’t have,” who he had known for a decade before. Perhaps his most profound bit of advice he could give from his experience? “You haven’t lived until you’ve failed.”
The interview via Fox News below:
