(2001-2009)
Kerry wins in 2004, loses the popular vote. The Kerry administration goes badly with the economy still crashing, and Bush beats Kerry in 2008 in a landslide. By 2012, Bush is credited with keeping the American economy from falling into a second Great Depression.
Oh. Well, keep 9/11 from happening. Bush should be able to win re-election on the basis of the recovery from the dot-com crash, and 2008 should be delayed by a couple years.
Without 9/11, Bush would retain his pragmatic, anti-interventionist policies
Unless he allows Rumsfeld and Cheney to influence him too much.
Indeed. But, again, without some sort of provocative attack...
I think that interventionist strain will still pop up, but less so than OTL.
Maybe he'd bomb Al-Qaeda, Iraq too, but there will be no "Enduring Freedom."
Of course he won't invade Iraq, but I think he'll be more hawkish than Clinton.
Troops were already in the Balkans when he took over so technically you are right.He still has a foreign policy team made up of neocons advising military action. More broadly, essentially every US president in the past 100 years has sent US troops into combat somewhere; it seems unlikely that that won't happen under Bush. And once it does, Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz/etc. will use it to test out their theories, with OTL's disastrous results.
He still has a foreign policy team made up of neocons advising military action. More broadly, essentially every US president in the past 100 years has sent US troops into combat somewhere; it seems unlikely that that won't happen under Bush. And once it does, Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz/etc. will use it to test out their theories, with OTL's disastrous results.
His approval ratings were not hurt by Iraq that much. They were hurt by the perception of a lack of internal competence as judged by FEMA's reaction to Katrina, the ill advised attempt to partially privatize social security (which he campaigned on, which makes it odd that people were surprised, but whatever..), and the Republican Party scandals of 2006 through Abrahamoff and Foley.Have the faction that was against de-Ba'athization win out in the reconstruction of Iraq. It doesn't happen and the Iraqi army isn't fired. The country is successfully rebuilt and becomes a stable enough state with a small insurgency. The 2006-2007 civil war and the surge don't happen. That, more than anything else is what soured people on him; his approval ratings dropped into the thirties in '06 and never recovered. I think he would finish up in the 45-50% range and be further rehabilitated after being away from the Presidency similar to what actually happened in OTL.
Make George W Bush have a successful presidency (2001-2009)
His approval ratings were not hurt by Iraq that much. They were hurt by the perception of a lack of internal competence as judged by FEMA's reaction to Katrina, the ill advised attempt to partially privatize social security (which he campaigned on, which makes it odd that people were surprised, but whatever..), and the Republican Party scandals of 2006 through Abrahamoff and Foley.