It's the anniversary of Watergate with all sorts of rebroadcasts of that fun event. I've set my TiVo to record most of them, including a Dick Cavett special on PBS which I'm told is quite wonderful. C-Span is also rebroadcasting much of the hearings.
My friend Roger still refers to it as the time Democrats, for partisan reasons, drove a Republican president out of office. I think it's obviously a case of Republicans driving the guy out, lest he cripple the party for years to come. Keeping Nixon in the job was the gift that kept on giving to Democrats. They kept investigating the guy and finding more and more, winning over more of the nation. Why would they have wanted that to end, especially since it meant setting up a new president who could run as an incumbent in 1976?
It was Republicans who panicked because the issue of what had to be done about Richard M. Nixon was splitting their base. If I'd been a Republican congressperson or senator, I'd have been terrified of casting an ultimate vote on impeachment. If I'd voted with Nixon, I'd have lost half the Republican vote, as about half of all Republicans had decided Nixon was guilty of criminal actions and/or had become such a liability to the party that it was time to get rid of him. And if I'd voted against Nixon, I'd have lost the other half. The other half would have backed him if he'd started robbing liquor stores.
You cannot get elected in this country if you split your base…which is why a delegation of G.O.P. leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that Republicans in Congress would not stand allied behind him. Barry Goldwater, the man with the best credentials as a Republican, said he'd probably even vote against Nixon on at least one article of impeachment. Nixon knew that if he could no longer portray the whole investigation as a political witch hunt by the Dems, it was over. And so it was over.
I wonder how many of those calling for (or at least refusing to rule out) the impeachment of the current guy believe that would happen. I think most of them just know there are short-term advantages to telling certain constituents that they'll save America from the evil boogeyman they've made Obama out to be. But there are still people out there who think Obama committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors just by being elected and they're still trying to figure out how to make that sound more like actionable charges. I'm going to watch all those Nixon specials with that in mind.