Jenny Sanford Opens Up

5116937Jenny Sanford loved helping her husband South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford run his political campaigns, she reveals in a new interview -- but the strain it put on their marriage prompted her to secretly wish for his career to stay within certain confines.

"Campaigns are exhilarating because all sorts of people come out of the woodwork to help," Sanford tells Vogue magazine.

"Nevertheless," Vogue writes, "when her husband was on the short list to be John McCain's running mate, Sanford silently prayed it would not come to pass. Life in the fishbowl that is the governor's mansion has not always been easy for her or her children."

That life became much more difficult after Mark Sanford admitted in June to having an extramarital affair. Since then, Jenny Sanford and the couple's four sons have moved out of the governor's mansion in Columbia to the family home on Sullivan's Island.

Jenny Sanford tells Vogue she was shocked to learn of her husband's affair.

"It never occurred to me that he would do something like that," she says. "The person I married was centered on a core of morals. The person who did this is not centered on those morals."

Male politicians are prone to such mistakes, Sanford says, because of the ego boost that comes with an elected office.

"Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world," she says. "I saw that from the very beginning. They'll say they need something, and ten people want to give it to them. It's an ego boost, and it's easy to drink your own Kool-Aid."

Sanford repeated her insistence that she is willing to forgive her husband but that it is up to him to save their marriage. "The ball is in his court," she says.