For starters, this summer when her husband held the customary I-have-disappointed-my-family press conference, she did not appear alongside him. This was a doubly wise move, since the governor apparently chose to make the most emotional and difficult announcement of his life without a script. Not only did Jenny Sanford avoid looking like a fool for literally standing by her man, she didn’t have to be associated with what quickly devolved into a p.r. train wreck. (His rambling, 18-minute speech included weeping, a mention of his lifelong love of camping and a “surreal” conversation he’d recently had with his father-in-law.)
Then, not long after her husband’s confession, Jenny gave an interview to the Associated Press. She was a model of control, revealing just enough detail about the affair to communicate her blamelessness in the events that transpired without letting her situation tip into the pitiable. Wearing a perky printed blouse, she stayed relentlessly on message: she was holding up her end of the deal ”” if her husband wanted back into the family, he would have to reciprocate. “It’s one thing to forgive adultery,” she said. “It’s another thing to condone it.”
While Jenny Sanford was certainly provoked, unfortunately it does appear, as this article intimates, that she in a calculating way did “spin” the situation to destroy her husband -“Hell has no fury like a women scorned”- rather than thinking about the best interests of her sons. It is not “savvy” to not protect your children to the very best of your ability. Indeed, Gov. Sanford himself should have handled the situation in a much more private way for the benefit of the children. The first obligation of parents is their children and in this case it seems that both parents failed their children.
Actually, tgs, it sounds more like to me that the Times writer is trying to spin the fact that Jenny Sanford has behaved in almost every way as a class act.
You can tell the bias of the writer by his own spin of trying to make someone’s being a “model of control” somehow a bad thing. “Let herself be associated with Job” rather than “she was associated with the character of Job” and “showing enough pain to be sympathetic yet enough grit to avoid seeming pathetic” is rhetoric meant to make her look calculating in the display of a sham courage and wisdom and honesty and integrity that she has shown, when all that it might be is actual courage, wisdom, honesty and integrity.
And come on . . . “here’s at least one governor she could pulverize” — Jenny Sanford didn’t “pulverize” the governor — he did it to himself, and she had but to stand there and try to have some dignity while he behaved like a buffoon.
All the article above demonstrates to me is that Jenny Sanford has some enemies.
Interesting.
I agree with Sarah on this one. The article works by deconstructing actions that are on the face praiseworthy by speculating about motives for those actions that are less so. It’s cheap.
When you are a public person, and the other party in an issue speaks publicly about it, then I’m not sure how much leeway there is to stay entirely private. The media tends to create things if they aren’t ‘fed’ with a critical minimum of stuff from the key players.
That’s just part of the reality of being a public person in the modern era.
But it seems that this is yet another example where some women seem to go out of their way to attack the women who were faithful when their husband was not. The feminist dream of female solidarity seems to be one of its more pernicious illusions.
Have to agree with #2 and #3. Jenny Sanford is described as “Wearing a perky printed blouse.” She “communicated her blamelessness.” Well, yes; she didn’t commit adultery, he did. The whole article is written to show Mrs. Sanford as a scheming political wife, not a woman trying to maintain some dignity and poise in an awful situation.
The savviest spurned woman in history?
I might be able to believe that should she become Secretary of State…