“Finally, a new model for the wronged political spouse,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. Over the last few weeks, we have witnessed the bizarre spectacle of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford confessing to an affair with an Argentine woman he described as his “soul mate” and admitting that he also “crossed lines” with others. The “usual drill” for this sort of scandal calls for the dutiful wife to appear with her contrite husband at a press conference (think the Spitzers, Craigs, Vitters, etc.). But Jenny Sanford, the Republican governor’s wife of 19 years and the mother of his four sons, is “neither enabler nor victim.” She said she has children to protect, and so is willing to work on her marriage. But she made it clear the onus, and the shame, is her husband’s. “His career is not a concern of mine,” she said. “I’m worried about my family.” In short, Jenny “is standing by his side, but she is not hiding in a hole.”
It’s the “standing by his side part” I find perplexing, said Tina Brown in TheDailybeast.com. When Jenny refused to explain her husband’s mysterious absence from the state, it seemed she “was setting the table for a big matrimonial lawyer to have a payday on behalf of all the humiliated political wives.” But then she issued “a pious manifesto” that lets the jerk off the hook if, in her words, “he continues to work toward reconciliation with a true spirit of humility and repentance.” That left me cold, too, said Joan Walsh in Salon.com. Jenny Sanford, a former investment banker who ran her husband’s campaigns, is yet another highly capable woman who sacrificed her career to play a supporting role in her husband’s—only to be repaid with adultery. “Maybe she needs to take a page from Hillary Clinton and stop subordinating her own ambition to his.”
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