Behind door #1 is continued power and respect. Go along to get along and your legacy is secure. Play nice and a $5 mill/year lobbying job awaits.
Behind door #2 is personal and professional doom, misery if not poverty. “They threaten to expose something terrible like an affair, or corruption, or malfeasance, or immorality that would shock the nation, ruin your career, destroy your legacy, cost you your marriage, destroy your relationship with your children and leave you unemployable by any respectable law firm or lobbyist.”
Why would you assome, in light of Bhoner having never been a firebrand right winger, that he was blackmailed to begin with?
I agree that some of them do indeed get blackmailed. No doubt. But most of these guys, all rhetoric aside, are compromised ethically before ever getting into politics to begin with.
It’s easy to tell which. Every mother tells their kids that you are the company you keep. Or kept. To mix a metaphor, Hyena’s don’t change their spots.