Stalking Silvio

When Italian Prime Minister Silvio throws a party at his villa here on the island of Sardinia, Antonello Zappadu is usually hiding in the bushes, dressed in military fatigues and snapping photos with a high-power zoom.

Over the years, Mr. Zappadu has taken thousands of pictures of Mr. Berlusconi at Villa Certosa, including some of the prime minister strolling hand-in-hand with an array of women and aboard a raft on the villa's artificial lake.

Whether those hand-holdings were spicy or not, well, who really knows?

Mr. Zappadu's latest photos have trained a telephoto lens onto Mr. Berlusconi's private life. Published in El Pais, a Spanish newspaper, they include shots of topless women and a former Czech prime minister sunbathing naked at the villa. The photos were followed by statements by women who claimed they were paid to attend parties hosted by the prime minister, which Mr. Berlusconi denied.

A little spicy, at least, no?

Mr. Berlusconi isn't hurting politically; he is still Italy's most popular politician. But he is under pressure to provide serious answers.

Pressure from other politicians and the media, one supposes, for Silvio remains quite popular, amazingly.

Mr. Berlusconi attended a recording of an Italian television program on May 5 while a portrait of Ms. Lario was displayed behind him











Mr. Berlusconi has charged the foreign media with fanning his troubles. In one episode, he accused News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal, of orchestrating personal attacks on him through the media in retaliation for the Italian government's decision in late November to raise the value-added tax on satellite TV subscriptions, a market dominated in Italy by News Corp.'s Italian pay-TV unit Sky Italia. Rupert Murdoch, CEO and chairman of News Corp., called the allegations "nonsense" in an interview on Fox Business Network earlier this month.

Blaming foreign media is a proven way of reducing pressure and shifting focus. Ahmadinejad is doing it, Silvio too. In fact, Murdoch and Berlusconi are quite similar, except that Rupert runs a media empire and Silvio runs a country as well as a media empire.

After months of scrutiny, Mr. Berlusconi struck a defiant note on Thursday. "This is how I'm made, and this is how Italians want me," Mr. Berlusconi told a news conference, adding: "I won't change."

Photographer Antonello Zappadu, above, met Berlusconi shortly after he was first elected prime minister in 1994. Mr. Zappadu's professional pursuit intensified in 2007 after the prime minister's wife publicly chastised her husband for flirting with another woman.

Selfish?

Struggling to restore his political capital and hold onto his job, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford held a televised meeting of his cabinet Friday, during which he offered another emotional apology for an extramarital affair and six-day disappearance to Argentina.

He's really sorry.

State Sen. Tom Davis, one of the governor's closest allies, said Friday the governor's ability to remain in office "will depend on whether the people of South Carolina think he's sincere."

Is he really sorry? And, of what: doin' it, or gettin' caught?

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who took over as chairman of the governors group and is one of the most influential leaders in the party, said admissions like Mr. Sanford's do harm a party that has tried to define itself around strong moral principles, but that he is focusing now on gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

"There's certainly a negative," Mr. Barbour said. "But as to a practical effect...I don't think a single voter in New Jersey or Virginia is going to be affected by what happened to Gov. Sanford."

THAT remains to be seen.

A Political Wife’s Tough Stance Strikes a Chord

Dina Matos McGreevey, left, and Silda Wall Spitzer, right, stood beside their husbands as they admitted marital infidelity during news conferences. Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, center, faced the cameras alone.










When Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina gave what has become a ritualistically familiar part of American politics — the news conference on marital infidelity — there was no dutiful political wife to share the spotlight and, by her very presence, imply forgiveness.

The juxtaposition of the wifes in this picture and the absence of Jenny Sanford is stark.

Jenny Sanford, the first lady of South Carolina, left her husband alone to burble at length about his yearlong affair with a woman from Argentina. Instead Mrs. Sanford released a statement that was hard hitting and to the point: she said she wanted her marriage to continue but demanded nothing less, as her price, than her husband’s “repentance.” On Friday, she told reporters she had known of the affair since January but had waited for her children’s school year to end before separating from him.

O, and did he burble.

For thousands of women, responding on the Internet and Twitter, Mrs. Sanford’s decision to hold her husband accountable provided a catharsis, a kind of public exorcism of the ghosts of political wives past.

Meryl B. Koopersmith, a couples therapist with the Ackerman Institute for the Family in Manhattan, felt similarly pleased with Mrs. Sanford. “You see all kinds of reactions to affairs in families,” Ms. Koopersmith said, “but very few who stand there stoically. Then these political wives, they are a different breed, almost semiconscious. I am all for the wife who doesn’t stand there like some puppet.”

It's unfathomable to me that a woman would stand next to such a creep, in public, and absorb the humiliation.

Few could forget Hillary Rodham Clinton’s sitting next to her husband, Bill Clinton, as he acknowledged to “60 Minutes” that he had caused pain in his marriage; or Dina Matos McGreevey, looking half dazed as Jim McGreevey detailed a homosexual affair and resigned the governorship of New Jersey; or Silda Wall Spitzer, posing just behind Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York as he discussed hiring expensive call girls, her jaws clenched so tight that she could have cracked steel bars.

Great expression; a look at the picture confirms it.

Of course, Mrs. Sanford is hardly throwing the governor out for good. She has said she is open to reconciliation.

Still, for many women, this apparent softening did nothing to diminish her dignity. Cristina Nehring, the author of “A Vindication of Love,” a new book that argues that cynicism and pragmatism have corrupted American marriages — which, she says, should be more about true passionate love — called Mrs. Sanford’s performance “impressive” all the way around.

Speaking to the same issue, Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies and author of “Marriage: A History,” said she found Mrs. Sanford’s reaction “more authentic” than that of most other political wives. “She is saying she wants the marriage to survive but I am not coming out to humiliate myself in public for it,” Ms. Coontz said.

Indeed. And, in this case, the schmuck asked for permission to see his mistress again.

“If we assume the relationship is genuine on Sanford’s part, that is much more threatening to a marriage than just sex,” said Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and co-author of a textbook on contemporary family law.

He certainly seemed to be; he said he'd been crying for 5 days. And he missed Father's Day.

Governor’s Wife Is Hurt but Unbowed

Jenny Sanford, the first lady of South Carolina, at the family’s beachfront home Thursday on Sullivan’s Island, S.C.












As Jenny Sanford headed off for a boating trip, the day after her husband, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, told the world he had been unfaithful, she met the throng of reporters waiting outside her South Carolina vacation home, all inquiring about her emotional condition.

“Am I O.K.?” Mrs. Sanford repeated, from the driver’s seat of a vehicle. “You know what? I have great faith and I have great friends and great family. We have a good Lord in this world, and I know I’m going to be fine. Not only will I survive, I’ll thrive.”

No shrinking violet, or mumbling loyal wife, she.

It was, friends and former aides say, classic Jenny Sanford — strong willed, steely, anything but a victim. Mrs. Sanford, a former New York investment banker, largely gave up her professional life and turned to helping her husband’s political career, but those who know her well say she was also never one to abandon her sense of identity, her direction, or her own opinions.

Anything but a victim; good for her. And for others.

To one reporter who wondered what might come of Mr. Sanford’s political career, Mrs. Sanford answered sharply: “His career is not a concern of mine. He’s going to have to worry about that. I’m worried about my family and the character of my children.” And with that, Mrs. Sanford, who spent much of Thursday with her husband and said she was working on her marriage, pulled away, smilingly telling the assembled cameras, “I wish we had room on the boat for you all, but we do not.”

Now, buzz off.

Jenny Sanford was described by friends as strong willed.


Even within the dimensions of her husband’s political life, Mrs. Sanford was not merely a helpmate in a traditional first lady role, but managed her husband’s political campaigns (at first, from their basement) and later acted as a sounding board on matters of policy, a fact that one former aide to Mr. Sanford said regularly irked some members of his staff. She often studied data that was sent to the governor’s office and helped develop positions, one senior legislative staff member said, describing her as “the real brains behind the operation.”

A, so he's the air-head. And a putz; to wit:

Through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Sanford declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but told The Associated Press she learned of her husband’s affair early this year when she found a letter he had written. She told him to end the relationship, but he repeatedly asked permission to visit the woman in Argentina in the months that followed.

“I said absolutely not,” Mrs. Sanford told The A.P. “It’s one thing to forgive adultery. It’s another to condone it.”

He asked his wife's permission to keep seeing his mistress, the weasel. And this jerk was supposed to be presidential timber?

“She is one of those people who is always the smartest person in the room,” said Marjory Wentworth, a friend who is also the poet laureate of South Carolina.

In 1989, the couple married, but it was not until she had her second child that politics entered their family picture. “It was quite a surprise to me,” she told The Greenville News of South Carolina. “When he told me, I was in the hospital, and we had just delivered our second son. So we had a 15-month-old and a newborn, and he says to me, ‘I’m going to run for Congress.’”

Sounds a mite selfish.

From home, Mrs. Sanford managed that first campaign in 1994, and then his run for governor.

Friends, however, credit Mrs. Sanford with the ultimate juggling act: happily serving as a first lady who would choose one of her son’s class plays over a presidential dinner anytime, but who was also perfectly comfortable discussing intricacies of the state’s finances.

“So often when a woman is business minded, they’re not good at being a cookie baking soccer mom, but that’s the thing about Jenny,” said Jennifer Pickens, a friend for over a decade. “You cannot stereotype her that way. She can be either one of those things and do it effortlessly.”

In recent weeks, and even on Wednesday, as her husband acknowledged his affair, friends said Mrs. Sanford had remained cheerful, gracious and strong. Lalla Lee Campsen, a friend of 20 years, was with Mrs. Sanford that day and described it as a time “when Jenny exuded, perhaps as never before, her great strength of character.”

Her friends praised the statement she issued that day, saying that she would press to repair her marriage and forgive but that she had also asked her husband to leave — at least for now.

“That was definitely her, all her,” Ms. Pickens reflected. “It reeks of her. She will survive this beautifully.”

Reeks? Perhaps not the best choice of words, but the sentiment is clear.

The Argentine Firecracker

Gail Collins on the mark.


The only good news this week for Gov. Mark (“I love your tan lines”) Sanford is that all those celebrity deaths have knocked him off the top of the news cycle.

Poor Farrah Fawcett got knocked off the top of the page by Michael Jackson.

For the rest of us, the whole vanishing-governor-sneaks-off-to-visit-Argentine-squeeze has had a number of side benefits. The Appalachian Trail has certainly gotten a well-deserved shot of publicity. And I have to believe that business is booming for call-forwarding services.

Another big plus is that Governor Sanford has provided us with a chance to revisit little-remembered historical precedents for scandals involving American politicians and Argentine women.

O, yes: Fanne Foxe, “The Argentine Firecracker," who took a hysterical leap into the Tidal Basin after a fight with her inebriated escort, the House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas. I remember.

Foxe was a stripper at the Silver Slipper nightclub in Washington, and the married Mills began escorting her around during a period of major-league alcoholism. They were speeding past the Jefferson Memorial when they were stopped by police. Foxe jumped out, took a dive into the Tidal Basin, and pretty soon Mills was in the headlines and in disgrace.

Years later, after he had retired, dried out and returned to Washington as a tax lawyer, Mills told a Times reporter that during his Firecracker days, he was drinking a half-gallon of vodka a night and had hallucinations that buzzards were chasing him. As a result, he said, he lost control of his committee and failed to report out a bill in which he had a great interest.

“I had President Ford convinced on national health,” Mills said. “I could have passed it on the floor. But hell, I couldn’t get the damned committee to go with me. They had never failed to do that before, and I know now it was because of my drinking that they didn’t.”

All of that I didn't know about.

Now South Carolinians will have to decide if they want their state run by a man who can’t remember to leave a forwarding number when he scampers off to make whoopee in a different hemisphere.

While most people in the state seem to feel as if it would be swell if Sanford just resigned, the governor isn’t showing any signs that he intends to quit. It isn’t entirely clear why he wants to hang on. He’s term limited. And whatever presidential ambitions he harbored were pretty much quashed when he vanished and aides started explaining that he took a hike (well, not really) because he was emotionally exhausted from his fight over the state budget. You had to ask what he’d have to do to get over North Korea.

Really.

So far, it appears that Sanford is going to devote his career to apologizing. On Wednesday, he held a press conference and apologized to everyone from his father-in-law to American Christianity. On Thursday, he was closeted with his wife, which undoubtedly involved heavy-duty apology time. Friday, he called his staff together for more apologies, including one to the leader of the Commerce Department, to whom the governor conveyed his regrets for having undermined the dignity of a state trade mission by having sex on the Buenos Aires stop.



It was right about then that Sanford compared himself to King David, who “fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick up the pieces.” I will end here so we can all ask ourselves whether the entire course of the Old Testament would have been different if David and Bathsheba had had access to e-mail.

Amen.

Silvio being Silvio

Remo Casilli/Reuters - Much of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s success stems from his uncanny ability to read the national mood of Italians.








The Times (above) and the Journal (below) have stories about Silvio: Prime Minister’s Escapades Finally Raise Eyebrows and No 'Spice' in Berlusconi Ties

His smile and gestures are ever-present, but an 18 year-old?






AFP/Getty Images -Noemi Letizia, a young aspiring model, posing in her parents' home in April with a photo signed by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and wearing the gold and diamond necklace offered by Mr. Berlusconi for her 18th birthday.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Thursday denied having a "spicy" relationship with an 18-year-old aspiring model, as he stepped in to quell a political and personal storm that has tested the media mogul's public-relations savvy.

A spicy relationship. Or a steamy one.

The prime minister has repeatedly denied anything untoward in his rapport with Ms. Letizia, who has posed in her underwear and said in a recent interview that she was a virgin. On Thursday, Mr. Berlusconi said he had “absolutely not” had “a relationship, let’s say steamy or more than steamy, with an under-age girl.”

When the wife of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took to the front pages this month to announce that she wanted a divorce and accused him of dallying with very young women, it seemed like yet another storm that Italy’s most powerful man would easily weather. For years, Italy has winked at Mr. Berlusconi, where other nations might have glared.

But then things took a turn for the surreal.

First came a rare and inescapable torrent of speculation — in blogs, on television and radio, at dinner tables across Italy — about the nature and origins of his relationship with Noemi Letizia, a pretty blond aspiring model whose 18th birthday party he attended in Naples last month, and who has said she calls him Daddy. This was the party that caused Mr. Berlusconi’s wife to declare their marriage, one year older than Ms. Letizia, over.

Nice turn of a phrase: the marriage one year older than the pretty blond in question.

More recent are allegations, potentially more damaging, that Mr. Berlusconi, 72, invited Ms. Letizia and about 40 other girls, some like her at the time younger than 18, to spend New Year’s Eve at one of his villas in Sardinia.

40 all at once? Silvio is ambitious. What else he is, is the question.

On Thursday, Mr. Berlusconi raised the subject before a battery of photographers and a television camera that had gathered to follow a meeting in his office. "I've responded to the only question that everyone has a right to ask me: 'Mr. President, did you have relations, let's say spicy or more than spicy, with a minor?' The response is, 'Absolutely not,'" Mr. Berlusconi said. "On top of that, I swore on the heads of my children."

“I have sworn it on the life of my children,” he added. “If this were perjury, I would have to resign a minute later.”

Are those the children whose birthday parties he did not attend? There are different translations of the Italian word, as there were with steamy/spicy.

Mr. Berlusconi's response to questions surrounding Ms. Letizia hasn't been as nimble, some analysts say. "I've never seen him like this," says Alessandro Campi, a political scientist at the University of Perugia and director of right-wing think tank FareFuturo. "He hasn't been able to keep the situation under control."

In an interview with CNN, which was taped Saturday and aired Monday, Mr. Berlusconi pledged to publicly clear the air.

Also Monday, Naples daily Il Mattino published an interview with Mr. Letizia, recounting how he first shook hands with Mr. Berlusconi at a public event in 1990. Mr. Letizia said his relationship with Mr. Berlusconi deepened in 2001, when the prime minister sent a handwritten letter to the family consoling them over the death of their son in a car accident. Mr. Letizia, reached by phone, confirmed the contents of the interview but declined to elaborate.

1990? Nineteen years ago? She's 18. Even Silvio can't manage that.

And yet, Mr. Berlusconi still governs virtually unopposed. “The problem is simply that the Italians can’t imagine who could replace Berlusconi at the moment,” said Tim Parks, a novelist and commentator on Italy. “It’s too dangerous and too much effort to replace him. So it hardly matters how bad the scandal is.”

Or, as the right-wing politician Francesco Storace said in a recent radio interview, “People don’t vote for Berlusconi because he tells the truth; they vote for him because they like him.”

Pity poor Italy.

In what many see as a sign of Mr. Berlusconi’s grip on the levers of power in Italy and the Vatican, the Italian Bishops Conference this week essentially gave him a pass, or at least a no comment, calling for “adult behavior,” but saying that each person’s conduct was a matter “of individual conscience.”

Now, that is quite an interesting comment, coming from the Vatican. I wonder how the US Catholic church would react?

“Things are completely turned upside down,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a commentator for Il Sole 24 Ore radio. “Those who always represented the family and faithful couples are happy to justify hanky-panky,” he said. While some on the left, “which always professed a belief in total sexual freedom, are now like inquisitors with their fingers wagging.”

This is better than fiction.