As the public edges toward impeachment, will the GOP follow? by lisabelkin
It is an iconic moment in modern American history, the day in 1974 when the leaders of the Republican Party in Congress went to the White House to tell a Republican president he was through — that facing all but certain impeachment in a Democrat-controlled Congress, he couldn’t rely on support from his fellow Republicans. The day after that visit from Sen.
But it’s good to remember that in the early days of Watergate it had seemed unlikely that Republican minds would change, either. A year before his final trip to the Nixon White House, Goldwater had told Time magazine: “Watergate is the concern of every Republican I talk to. But both conservatives and liberals in the party are ready to stand behind the president.”
There is a sociological model known as the cascade effect. A dinner party goes on and on, and finally someone stands up and says, usually with apology, that they must leave. Soon nearly everyone at the table is headed for the door. A lone agitator throws a rock through a window, and soon thousands are rioting. One well-known actress describes sexual abuse at the hands of a prominent Hollywood executive, and soon hundreds of women bring long-buried accusations to light.
It didn’t work out that way. The appearance of two such prominent and controversial officials early on put a public face on the investigation and gave it momentum, setting off a cascade effect that reversed public opinion. Only 19 percent of Americans believed Nixon should be removed from office when the Senate Watergate hearings began in May 1973; by August 1974 it was nearly 60 percent.
“To revisit that analogy of a dinner party,” Bassetti said in an interview with Yahoo News, “unlike a more usual one where when you leave you just go to your car, at this one you have to run the gauntlet through a mob that wants to beat you up before you get to your car. So you’re not going to see one person getting up from the dinner party. You’re going to see 30 people going to the restroom and then trying to sneak out the back.
To that, George Conway, a vocal Trump critic who is also the husband of Trump’s key adviser Kellyanne Conway, responded: “I agree with this. There may be Republican senators who won’t say a word until the moment they say “guilty” when the roll is called at the end of an impeachment trial.”
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