Due to all the ideas I've had that never actually ended up on paper and me realizing after this hiatus that they'll probably never be turned into timelines, I've decided to just put out the ideas on a presidents list. Expect more in the future, including my Nixon in Coolidge's body timeline and a Bush chokes on a pretzel short live election game and a Presidents of Deseret list. The first here is No Longer Bill, a spinoff of Plumber's excellent but unfinished No Longer Jack. No Longer Jack was about Kennedy surviving his assassination but the bullet leaving him like Phineas Gage, a strange erratic form of his old self that is now belittling allies and giving Goldwater an actual fighting chance in 1964. I thought what if something similar happened with Bill Clinton during the 1994 rather haphazard assassination attempt on his life by Francisco Duran.
No Longer Bill
1993-1995: Bill Clinton / Al Gore (Democratic) [1]
1992: George Bush / Dan Quayle (Republican), Ross Perot / James Stockdale (Independent)
1995: Al Gore / VACANT (Democratic) [2]
1995-1996: Al Gore / Hillary Clinton (Democratic) [3]
1996-1997: Hillary Clinton / VACANT (Democratic) [5]
1997: Bill Clinton / Maxine Waters (Democratic) [4]
1996: Jeb Bush / John McCain (Republican), Ross Perot / Dick Lamm (Reform)
1997: Maxine Waters / VACANT (Democratic) [6]
1997-2005: Maxine Waters / Dick Gephardt (Democratic)
2000: Rick Santorum / Terry Branstad (Republican), Peter Navarro / Pat Choate (Reform)
2005-2013: Richard Riordan / George Bush (Republican) [7]
2004: Paul Wellstone / Jocelyn Elders (Democratic), Jerry Brown / Drew Curtis (Reform)
2008: Hillary Clinton / Roland Burris (Democratic)
[1] When Duran's bullet struck the President through his cheek and out his skullcap, almost the entire nation expected that Bill Clinton would swiftly pass away or be put into a coma. Instead, the President made a recovery, although whether it can be called a "full" one is up for debate. He returned to the White House rather erratic, ignoring the applause from his staff and focusing his glare at Al Gore, the man who dared to be Acting President. A coup! Bastard probably sent Duran after him although he had no proof. Clinton becomes increasingly combative and secretive, seeing conspiracies everywhere but also having something knocked loose in him leading to him being more open with his mouth. After going on national television to curse out Newt Gingrich who he called "a fat fascist fuck", the midterm wave becomes even larger (although has a weirdly positive effect on Clinton's approval) and horrifies folks in the Democratic Party including savvy strategist Dick Morris who isn't naive enough to believe the wave was purely due to Clinton's comments. He knows the party overstepped with the healthcare bill and needs to triangulate.
But Clinton is not interested in moderating at all. Seeing Al Gore as part of a vast right wing conspiracy to steal his Presidency, Clinton starts creating a circle of Very Left Wing people on his side, going out of the way to start culture battles to defend Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders's comments on masturbation and legalizing drugs, dumping Lloyd Bentsen for Robert Reich as his new Treasury Secretary, calling Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan a "feudal fuckhead who would turn anyone that didn't personally vote for Goldwater into an indentured servant" on a CNN interview, and going on record in a press conference that he believes OJ "is 100% innocent unlike President Reagan or Senator North are of war crimes." With the culture war brewing, Clinton's personal approval stagnant, and the party's in the trash, Dick Morris continues to scheme with a very out of the loop Al Gore who realizes that Clinton is not all there in his head. After some brief asking around the Cabinet about the 25th Amendment, Clinton learns about Gore's scheming and proceeds to literally fire everyone right of him in the Cabinet to stop the "coup" right in its tracks. Gore wasn't sure before but now is sure that Clinton is dangerous and looks to other methods. He finds himself forced to talk with Gingrich about possibly impeaching the President, a deal Gingrich is happy to agree to in exchange for his pound of flesh.
[2] An avenue seems to come when it leaks that Clinton has been having an affair with an intern. When confronted on this, Clinton doesn't deny it and says "damn right I did", snatching away any chance of catching him in a lie. But this does lead to further investigations which does lead to it coming out that the President was snorting lines of cocaine alongside DC Mayor Marion Barry inside the Oval Office during their discussions on the future of DC statehood. Impeachment proceedings moved quickly as the Moral Majority screamed in rage at the impropriety. And while Clinton would find his defenders, those who now were convinced it was a right wing conspiracy, ultimately he had no allies in the Senate and few of influence in the House except for the fresh new Congressfolk that had come from his coattails. Al Gore would become the new President of the United States and wanting Clinton who had gained a following in the last few months due to his "tell it like it is" attitude and progressivism to stay on his side, tried to work things out. Clinton, defeated and rejected, in a spur of the moment demands that Gore make his wife (who, by the way, is privately really upset about that whole intern thing) the new Vice President. Gore almost spit takes but recognizes Clinton is deadly serious. He does the deed, and Clinton continues to mill about the White House due to his past position and his wife's new one much to Gore's irritation.
[3] But Gingrich comes to collect his debt. Part of the deal for support on impeachment was that Gore would push through a massive package to privatize Social Security for the sake of a balanced budget. This drives Bill bonkers and sees that Al really was a right wing shill after all. Hillary tries to calm him down, explaining this is just politics and that Bill in a different time would have done the same thing, but this only drives a rift between the two. Bill then declares that the people have been betrayed by a right wing conspiracy and only he can fix this mess. He was thrown out, the people's choice, but the people will not have their voice ignored. He announces his candidacy for the Presidency.
A brutal campaign with is launched by Bill against the current President and his wife. Filling stadiums full of supporters, using every dirty trick in the book, calling in every favor he has, Bill uses the full might of his myth that formed during his Presidency and the unpopularity of Gore's Republican-lite policies leads him to impossibly winning the nomination away from the unpopular Gore. Clinton makes no compromise and shows that his campaign represents a movement to the future with his choice of a black woman as his Vice Presidential nominee. The old Democratic Party was dead.
The Republicans meanwhile are hampered by their own success with Gore's unpopularity dragging them down as well. The sheer number of victories in the midterms leads to way too many credible candidates running including the ludicrousness of both Bush Brothers as well as Dan Quayle. The long contentious primaries would end with a contested convention that leads to Jeb Bush, the underwhelming Governor of Florida who learned none of the lessons from his OTL 1994 loss, to be the nominee. Jeb proceeds to do exactly as well as you'd expect, snatching defeating from the jaws of victory and just coming off as a light weight compared to the rhetorical verboseness of Bill.
Meanwhile, Perot runs again but sees most of his economic positions stolen by Bill Clinton which means he mostly just runs as a more socially conservative Bill Clinton, taking only Never Clinton votes that would have instead went to Bush. He would make a bit of a splash in the debates though although Bill mostly hogged the spotlight when he tore into Jeb as "the weakest man alive, the George Constanza of politics." Some of the audience could swear they saw tears in Jeb's eyes.
In the end, it was a tight race, but Jeb was an extremely of imperfect vehicle for the ascendant right while Bill Clinton was the perfect vehicle who could be anything to anyone, whether it be the more conservative Democrats who felt he was just playing a show or those on the left who really saw someone who would do what he promised. Clinton would squeeze through a victory and make history, coming back from impeachment and removal to take back his throne.
[5] Tragedy would strike after the election when President Gore, on route from an APEC summit in Manila, was killed in an bomb attack on his convoy. A Islamist radical named Osama bin Laden would take credit for the assassination, saying this was the price the US would pay for violating the sacred lands during Desert Shield. The short Presidency of Hillary Clinton and the tragedy of Al Gore's death would unite the Clintons once again as even with brain damage, something stirred in the President-elect's heart. In a national address of unity, President Hillary Clinton and the President-elect would announce that every measure would be taken to bring bin Laden to justice and announced a War on Terror.
[6] With American troops in Afghanistan and Sudan and as tensions flared further with Saddam as his use of chemical weapons became more liberal, Bill Clinton would only assume office for a short time before passing away. The bullet may not have taken his life, but it did drastically reduce it and three weeks of coma merely a month after putting his hand on the Bible and saying those solemn words before shuffling off this mortal coil was all. Maxine Waters would take the oath and promise to fulfill the Clinton legacy with every fiber of her being. bin Laden was brought to justice after a long arduous march of three years. Waters would struggle to pass her signature bills with the House still under Republican control, but it's still a time relatively fondly remembered despite the bitter culture wars of abortion, drugs, Ten Commandment monuments, etc. Santorum brought his holy crusade to life at the dawn of the new millennium in an election for the ages, marked with bitterness, anger, polarization, and ultimately exhaustion.
[7] This exhaustion would manifest with a rather moderate normal ticket winning, the California Governor as well as the more introspective, quiet Bush brother. The younger Bush had seen how the country had torn itself apart during the past three campaigns, exhausting the faith of the people. He had seen how almost a decade of war and nation building, propping up shaky regimes in Kabul, Khartoum, and Baghdad had drained the best blood of a generation. He wanted it to be over, and the nation agreed. As Vice President Bush looks to gaining a third term for the Republican Party and continue the relative stability of the Riordan years while Hillary Clinton gears up for a third direct match-up of the families against each other, he feels he is the man uniquely suited to bring about a new era of peace and prosperity.