Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford says he asked his ex-wife Jenny to be his campaign manager in his bid for a congressional seat this year. She declined, according to
New York magazine.
Sanford resigned as chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2009, after he admitted that he had an affair with an Argentine woman. It was a hard fall for a rising Republican star tagged as a possible presidential candidate.
Now he is running for the seat formerly occupied by Republican Tim Scott, who was appointed to the Senate last year to replace retiring Republican Jim DeMint.
Sanford met with his ex-wife at her home in December to see if she planned to run for the congressional seat. He said he told her, “If you have any thoughts about running for this, then I’m out, because I can't think of anything more disastrous than for a husband and wife to run against each other.”
When she indicated she wasn’t going to run, Sanford had another idea — to hire her as his campaign manager, the magazine reported.
In his first congressional race in 1994, Jenny Sanford filled that role — for cost reasons.
“You're free,” Sanford told her at the time. But she turned out to be very talented at running a political campaign.
This time around Sanford told her, “We could put the team back together.” When she said no, he replied, “I could pay you this time.”
But that wasn't enough to change her mind.
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