The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics

by Barton Swaim,
The Huffington Post, July 15, 2015

On June 24, 2009, at a hastily arranged press conference in the rotunda of the State House, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, and a rising star in the Republican Party, acknowledged that he had not spent the better part of a week "hiking on the Appalachian Trail." He had flown to Buenos Aires, Argentina to meet Maria Belén Chapur, with whom he was having an affair. "I hurt her, I hurt my wife," Sanford said. He did not, however, intend to resign as governor.