By Jeffrey Page

So Palin leaves when she ought to stay, and Sanford stays when he ought to leave.

In Alaska, Sarah Palin said she would quit the governor’s job in one month. This so she can be free to travel and presumably light the spark under her corner – it’s not actually a wing, is it? – of the GOP. She didn’t exactly say she would stump the nation in preparation for a 2012 presidential run. She didn’t exactly say anything else either.

Instead, during her not-quite-coherent announcement and a subsequent entry on her facebook page, she chanted familiar lines – “I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint” – but didn’t offer a single suggestion for, say, ensuring greater energy independence. This omission from the governor of oil-sodden Alaska. 

She scolded the press and the Establishment. “How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country,” Palin said. In other words, only she – and not all those suspicious reporters, editors, elected officeholders and appointed officials in Washington – knows what “it’s about country” means because, she suggested, she’s the only real patriot.

But she failed to address an obvious question: If resigning as governor in the middle of your first term is “about country,” what about Alaska, the state that trusted her to do a job?

If Palin quit to get a jump on going after the 2012 nomination, she’ll have a problem with voters, who actually expect governors and other elected officials to carry out their part of the bargain and finish their terms of office. It would have been difficult enough for her to run as a one-term governor from a small state. Now she opens herself to the derisive charge that she’s a half-term governor.

And just think, Sarah Palin, who quits when the spirit moves her, could have been that heartbeat away from an Oval Office occupied by a man in his 70s.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Governor Love says he’s staying put. That would be Mark Sanford, whose story of the heart is known to everyone who can read a headline or watch a newscast.

You know this sordid jumble. He went missing. Then his staff said he was on the Appalachian Trail trying to clear his head. But he was really in Argentina, having a week with his “soul mate.” Then he returned and was trying to learn to love his wife all over again. Then he quit as head of the GOP governors association. He might have been a candidate for president in 2012 and on and on.

In any case, he’s staying on as governor even as Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, Whigs and Tories, Socialists and anarchists, agnostics and saints, church people, unchurched people, ice cream salesmen, farmers, chicken pluckers and minor league ballplayers ask – demand, actually – that Sanford take his apologies, his heavy heart and his Peyton Place life and go elsewhere.

Such as Bosnia or Nepal. Or at least over the state line into North Carolina.
 
Not the Honorable Mark Sanford. After disgracing himself, humiliating his wife, exposing his lover, embarrassing his four children, and playing the fool before 4.5 million South Carolinians, Sanford decided to stand on principle.

He won’t go, he says, because he was elected to do a job for the people though lately he’s doing a job on the people.

In Palin and Sanford we have a pair of pols who don’t know when to stay and when to go. Here’s how to figure it out. If you haven’t been indicted and you’re still breathing you stay. If the people, especially if led by those of your own party, say it’s time to go, recite a nice speech and vanish.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

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