WASHINGTON — Republicans were just starting to breathe a little easier.
The news that Senator John Ensign had had an affair with a former aide who was married to another former aide was fading. Polls showed some voter impatience with President Obama’s policies, if not with the president himself. And the Politico, the insidery Web site that is widely read in the capital’s political precincts, even featured an article exploring the possibility of a Republican Party comeback.
Then Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a fiscal conservative seen by many Republicans as an attractive standard-bearer for the next presidential campaign, went missing. Worse, he returned.
His confession on Wednesday that he had been in Argentina with a woman not his wife — and not hiking the Appalachian Trail as his staff had said Monday — was another jolt of bad news for a party that has struggled to get off the ropes all year.
That it was the second such confession in little more than a week from a potential Republican presidential contender — Mr. Ensign had been exploring a run in 2012 as well — left party leaders dazed. They spent Wednesday alternating between gallows humor and yet another round of conversations about what the party stands for and who will give it its best shot to retake the White House.
“Personal circumstances over the course of the last week have managed to shrink the front line of the 2012 possible-contender list by 30 percent,” said Phil Musser, a former executive director of the Republican Governors Association.
Speaking of Mr. Sanford’s confession, Mr. Musser said, “The concern here is that this continues a broader narrative that is completely unhelpful to the Republican Party’s rebuilding — that’s life, but it’s a personal tragedy that fairly or unfairly compounds a series of problems.”
That series of problems has become so chronic that even the party’s most pragmatic members could be forgiven for wondering whether being named “possible 2012 contender” is like winning the movie role of Superman, long believed by some to carry a curse for those actors who don his blue tights.
One by one, those who have been publicly discussed as possible Republican candidates in 2012 have stumbled.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana suffered a political setback after even his fellow conservatives harshly critiqued his televised response to Mr. Obama’s prime-time address to Congress in February. The speech, which was supposed to provide a moment to shine in front of a national audience, instead became fodder for late-night comedy.
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the former Republican vice-presidential nominee who was eviscerated by some of her own political aides at the end of last year’s presidential race, continued to get national attention, but hardly the kind likely to help convince voters that she would be a substantive candidate. The father of her unwed teenage daughter’s baby feuded openly with the Palin family, and the governor exasperated some Republicans in Washington with her off-again, on-again plans for headlining a fund-raiser there.
After basking in glowing reviews among political pundits this year, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, had to apologize for a post on Twitter in which he called Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, “racist” for saying that she hoped Latinas would be generally better equipped to make judicial decisions than their white male counterparts.
Another possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah, fell out of contention when he accepted Mr. Obama’s offer to become ambassador to China, robbing the party of a rising star.
All of their troubles have served to improve the prospects of other contenders who have generally stayed out of the spotlight this year, or have ventured into it only gingerly, like former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi.
Some prominent party members argued that criticism in the mainstream news media of Ms. Palin, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Jindal did not reflect their standing among the conservative voters who decide primaries and caucuses — and that the confessions of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford would be viewed in isolation.
“I disagree with the idea that this shows problems for the modern Republican Party,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that applauded Mr. Sanford’s attempt to refuse some federal stimulus funds earlier this year. In reference to the fiscally conservative philosophies of Mr. Ensign and Mr. Sanford, he joked, “I think instead it shows that sexual attractiveness of limited-government conservatism.”
As television pundits noted on Wednesday, confessions by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York that he had been involved with a prostitute and by former Gov. Jim McGreevey of New Jersey that he had been unfaithful to his wife with a gay lover did not hurt Democrats nationally, although both men resigned.
But other senior Republican strategists and leaders said they were concerned that their party’s large segment of evangelical voters makes the party more vulnerable to political damage from scandal, especially when it involves politicians like Mr. Sanford and Mr. Ensign, who had both been harshly critical of the infidelities of former President Bill Clinton and others.
“When we do these kinds of things like what happened with Ensign and now with Sanford it hurts our credibility as a party of good governing and of values,” said Ron Kaufman, a Republican lobbyist who is close to Mr. Romney. Mr. Kaufman is among those in his party who believe that the news that former Representative Mark Foley of Florida had sent sexually explicit e-mail messages to male Congressional pages cost the party in 2006 and 2008.
“I think there is somewhat of an identity crisis in the Republican Party,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an evangelical group in Washington. “Are they going to be a party that attracts values voters, and are they going to be the party that lives by those values?”
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