DBWI: No 4/4/93 tornadoes?

Well folks, today is the 20th anniversary of the horrific April 4th tornado outbreak and I thought I might commemmorate it. On this Sunday evening, 118 tornadoes wreaked havoc from Central Texas to east Tennessee, killing 157 people, including the 48 who died in Louisiana and Mississippi from the Ridgeland tornado(30 in Ridgeland alone, a city of only 12,000 then).
President Clinton is well remembered for his excellent response to the disaster and it's because of this that he won re-election, in a landslide, in 1996.
19 years later, Hurricane Sandy killed over 250 people in the New York metro area and Barack Obama won his own re-election battle for the White House partly by emulating Clinton's example in '93 in terms of disaster response(He also did better than Susan Collins after Katrina. She was a nice Republican overall but she really could have hired a much more competent FEMA director. She does, however, deserve major props for how she handled 9/11 though.).

But what if the '93 tornadoes hadn't happened? Might Clinton have had less of a landslide and more fallout from the Waco incident? And if PBO had been able to win, could he still be able to pull off a PR victory if Sandy or a similar event had occurred?
 
OOC: Er... I'm confused - if Clinton was so popular, why didn't Gore get elected in 2000 (and subsequently 2004, as it will)?
 
Clinton would have been fine. The bigger impact, IMO, was on the music world. Remember, up-and-coming country musician Faith Hill was killed in that Ridgeland tornado, her debut album (which ended up being her only album) was released posthumously a few months later and ended up winning Album of the Year at the 1994 Grammys. How successful could she have been if she had lived?
 
OOC: Er... I'm confused - if Clinton was so popular, why didn't Gore get elected in 2000 (and subsequently 2004, as it will)?

OOC: No Dubya Bush, for one. Susan Collins is a moderate Republican and probably would have gone over better with moderate middle-of-the-road voters compared to Bush.

Clinton would have been fine. The bigger impact, IMO, was on the music world. Remember, up-and-coming country musician Faith Hill was killed in that Ridgeland tornado, her debut album (which ended up being her only album) was released posthumously a few months later and ended up winning Album of the Year at the 1994 Grammys. How successful could she have been if she had lived?

Yeah, that was pretty sad, TBH. It does remind me, btw, of what happened to Charlie Daniels when that F-5 tornado leveled most of that one town in Tennessee, just 6 years later, in October 1999; he was just one of 16 total casualties that day....and would have been 63 the next week. :(
 
Here's a butterfly that the tornado might have had. Remember that guy who tried to kill Janet Reno in 1995? Timothy McVeigh I think his name was? Apparently his original plan, according to his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, was to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma. Nichols said they changed the plan because he remembered how good Clinton was with those little babies in Arkansas and he decided that most of the blame for Waco rested with Reno, which is why him and McVeigh tried to kill her. I doubt they could've pulled off the bombing plot since McVeigh bungled the assassination attempt so badly (his gun jammed and he tried to stab her only to be tackled by like half a dozen guys), but there's a thought.

Anyway, I can't imagine how the response to the 4/4 outbreak could've bolstered Clinton's image any further. The F-5 tornado that plowed through downtown Oklahoma City six years later was WAY worse (ironically, one of the iconic images of that tornado was the Murrah building with all its windows shattered and its entire west wall ripped off) and Rush Limbaugh and his ilk got right back to bashing Clinton for that Lewinsky thing just a few days after he was seen comforting families in Oklahoma City. Hurricane Sandy killed less people than the 4/4 outbreak but it happened so close to an election that it undoubtedly had an effect, whereas with Clinton the election had already come and gone.

(OOC: I'm butterflying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Bridge_Creek_–_Moore_tornado this tornado a little ways to the north. IIRC you only have to move it about 10 miles and it goes right through downtown OKC.)
 
Here's a butterfly that the tornado might have had. Remember that guy who tried to kill Janet Reno in 1995? Timothy McVeigh I think his name was? Apparently his original plan, according to his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, was to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma. Nichols said they changed the plan because he remembered how good Clinton was with those little babies in Arkansas and he decided that most of the blame for Waco rested with Reno, which is why him and McVeigh tried to kill her. I doubt they could've pulled off the bombing plot since McVeigh bungled the assassination attempt so badly (his gun jammed and he tried to stab her only to be tackled by like half a dozen guys), but there's a thought.

The effectiveness of a hypothetical bombing McVeigh might have been involved depends how far out on the conspricy theory limb you go. The CT crowd make much of the vauge & circumstantial evidence of others backing up McVeigh in the Reno assasination. If in fact McVeigh was just a stooge then he might have planted a properly made bomb, or been one of several persons installing them.
 
Well, we know Terry Nichols was a co-conspirator in the Reno assassination attempt and wanted to do the bombing with him. Apparently he was supposed to be a second shooter in case McVeigh failed but he contracted stomach flu and McVeigh went in on his own and failed.

There's another POD for you (Terry Nichols' flu bug) but that's for another topic :)
 
Here's a butterfly that the tornado might have had. Remember that guy who tried to kill Janet Reno in 1995? Timothy McVeigh I think his name was? Apparently his original plan, according to his co-conspirator Terry Nichols, was to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma. Nichols said they changed the plan because he remembered how good Clinton was with those little babies in Arkansas and he decided that most of the blame for Waco rested with Reno, which is why him and McVeigh tried to kill her. I doubt they could've pulled off the bombing plot since McVeigh bungled the assassination attempt so badly (his gun jammed and he tried to stab her only to be tackled by like half a dozen guys), but there's a thought.

Anyway, I can't imagine how the response to the 4/4 outbreak could've bolstered Clinton's image any further. The F-5 tornado that plowed through downtown Oklahoma City six years later was WAY worse (ironically, one of the iconic images of that tornado was the Murrah building with all its windows shattered and its entire west wall ripped off) and Rush Limbaugh and his ilk got right back to bashing Clinton for that Lewinsky thing just a few days after he was seen comforting families in Oklahoma City. Hurricane Sandy killed less people than the 4/4 outbreak but it happened so close to an election that it undoubtedly had an effect, whereas with Clinton the election had already come and gone.

(OOC: I'm butterflying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Bridge_Creek_–_Moore_tornado this tornado a little ways to the north. IIRC you only have to move it about 10 miles and it goes right through downtown OKC.)

OOC: Sounds interesting to me.

IC: I remember that. 172 people were killed right as the tornado plowed thru downtown OKC just before 6 pm, or just after the peak of rush hour; and 20,000 required hospitalization for that.
Although the one good thing that came out of that, though, was that so many people were pissed off at Rush that his show lost about half his sponsors, and listenership, virtually overnight. In fact, Sean Hannity had that same problem with his show, too.

But anyway, yeah. The May 24th, 2011 Joplin tornado, often compared to the one in OKC, was pretty bad, TBH; 46 people died that day. And the EF-4(high end F-3 on the old scale for this one)in Tuscaloosa on April 27th killed 42; the collapse of a local college's roof when it struck the city accounted for 18 of those deaths, of a total of 285 on the 27th.

Still, though, neither of these can really compare to OKC '99, though.
 
Well, we know Terry Nichols was a co-conspirator in the Reno assassination attempt and wanted to do the bombing with him. Apparently he was supposed to be a second shooter in case McVeigh failed but he contracted stomach flu and McVeigh went in on his own and failed.

There's another POD for you (Terry Nichols' flu bug) but that's for another topic :)

Yeah, but the F.B.I. wasn't so lucky when they found out about the guy who was going to blow up that natural gas terminal in Ft. Worth in Sept. 1998.....unfortunately, he blew the whole damn thing sky high before the Feds could get to him.....410 people, including nearly all of the Feds & many cops who were there, were killed.

OOC: This was based on a real plot by members of the KKK in 1997....but with far more destructive potential. :(
 
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