Ever since Governor Mark Sanford said he might refuse all or part of the $2.8 billion in stimulus money the Obama administration wants to give South Carolina, I've been calling his office every week. I couldn't wait to hear how he was going to weasel out of it.

After all, that's what Bobby Jindal did down in Louisiana. After denouncing the stimulus as "irresponsible" and making the same noisy threats about rejecting his state's $2.4 billion, Jindal ended up accepting $2.3 billion.

And Sanford was in my sights. After I wrote a column ridiculing him for calling the bailout "a total gut-check of where we are as a civilization," he retaliated right here on Esquire.com with an op-ed blaming the economic crash on the Democrats and saying that Franklin Roosevelt made the Great Depression worse. My response eviscerated those feeble arguments in a bold rhetorical onslaught that left women weak in the knees and onlookers gasping in admiration.

But I have to give Sanford credit. Right after he announced that he was also going to take most of the money, he had the guts to pick up the phone. "I appreciate you doing this," I said, "especially since I was mean to you on first acquaintance."

"I've dealt with more than my share of sticks and stones over the last fifteen years of politics," Sanford answered, his voice soft and wry.

After reading up on his years as a congressman in Washington, I admitted, I had to give him credit for being so stingy that he slept on his office sofa. "You're not a hypocrite, I'll give you that."

He chuckled. "That's about the only thing I've got going for me, but I'll take that one."

"We've got to find common ground where we can."

"Exactly."

Cordiality achieved, we got down to it. In his announcement, Sanford said he was taking $2.1 billion only because he had no choice — it went direct from the feds to wasteful pork-barrel spending like Medicare payments for the sick and elderly, aid to the state's most troubled schools, and relief payments for hardworking people thrown out of their jobs by global forces beyond their control. But he was only going to take the remaining $700 million if Obama would let him use it to pay down the state debt — even though South Carolina taxpayers are still going to have to pay for that stimulus money in their federal taxes. So the first question was obvious:

Is Mark Sanford really going to make South Carolina $1.4 billion poorer just to make a point?

His answer began in general principles. Sanford believes "to the core" that you can't spend money you don't have. And $2.8 billion was just too much money to spend wisely. If a real person got a windfall that big, he'd pay off the mortgage or put some aside for a rainy day.

"But the money is intended as a stimulus," I pointed out.

"I hear you, but I think that a strong financial statement at the state level has everything to do with future borrowing costs, which impact what we can spend on other things. It has everything to do with..."

Stop right there, governor. Future borrowing costs? Isn't deficit spending just more "generational theft?"

But Sanford was on a roll, talking about the GM bailout and good money after bad and structural reforms that make you competitive in the global economy. It soon became clear that his immediate, practical goal was winning his endless fight against — and here's our first irony — the Republican-dominated South Carolina legislature. "The silver lining to the very gray clouds we're dealing with in the national economy is, it may force some changes in our state," he went on. "When times are great, people are not going to take tough medicine. They will take it in this environment."

Specifically, Sanford is concerned about something called an "annualization hole." The South Carolina legislature wants to put a big chunk of that $700 billion into education, which would create new programs that would need continuing funds when the federal money ran out. "In our state, everybody wants to be captain of the ship — you got technical schools trying to be two-year colleges, two-year colleges want to be four-year colleges, four-year colleges want to be research universities. It's an incredibly duplicative system."

"That's because you can't control your legislature, right?"

"Right. But all you can do in life is what you can do."

And why can't you control your legislature?

Here's irony No. 2: "We have an incredibly weird constitution built around the fear that a black man would be the governor of Carolina," Sanford said. "In 1895, we took the traditional functions of the executive branch and diffused them into the wind — it's an insane model with which to run your government in the twenty-first century. It causes us to be 130-percent the U.S. average in the cost of our state government, not because we have evil house and senate members but because we have this Balkanized political system that causes us to be sort of feudal in nature."

So he proposes to Balkanize the federal response to the greatest economic crises of our lifetimes! Oh, the irony!

But Sanford kept surprising me. At one point, he preemptively conceded some ground in the FDRgument: "If you look at the numbers, I wouldn't disagree with some of what happened in 1930s. But we're in a very different position financially in the 1930s...."

Then I started to question his jihad against debt. If spending money you don't have is so terrible, is it bad to have a mortgage?

"Unsustainable debt is bad. Debt isn't bad. I've got a mortgage on my house too."

And Sanford seemed sincere — genuinely sincere — when he said he took no pleasure in battling the president. "In raw human terms, I sat there on the couch of my sofa with tears in my eyes and my four boys gathered around me watching that speech he gave in Grant Park. Talk about Horatio Alger and overcoming incredible odds. I mean, the guy went against the biggest Democratic fundraising machine our country's ever known, humble beginnings, and here he is the president of the United States. I talked to the boys at length about that lesson. So I don't want to be making this stand, particularly against a guy in the first hundred days in office."

And what about all those socialistic activities that suddenly offend so many Joe-the-Plumber Republicans? Does he want to do away with the public school system, Social Security, the national park system, the interstate highway system, and on and on?

"I'm not an anarchist," Sanford said. "If you're truly a conservative — keep in mind many people in the Republican party these days are not — you absolutely believe in the role of government, because, one, you believe..."

The governor paused for several long beats.

"...that man is fallen — that man will, if unchecked, try to grab more than his or his share, and there is a legitimate role of government in checking those selfish proclivities."

None of this means that Sanford is a secret Democrat. But it does mean there's more to him than the inflammatory quotes that make the headlines and shrink our dwindling patch of common ground. As he continued, he mentioned how a chemical plant polluted the creek where he and his brothers used to play. "And I'm thinking, wait a minute, this is my water, too, just as much as it is theirs. Why do they dump this stuff in the creek and you can't go oyster where you oystered as a boy?" He also said that government has an obligation to "do things that people can't do for themselves," that he had "no problem with government mandating we have Social Security," and praised a state program that helps students get tuition grants to college. He concluded with a sentiment we can all agree on:

"Would I redesign the system? Yeah. Does that mean I want to end it? No."

So there's your final irony: In today's Republican party, the most conservative governor in the country sounds almost liberal.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson.

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