Past ten years with a Gore Presidency?

I don't think that the 9/11 attacks would be as likely to have been successful under the Gore administration. Bush was totally disinterested in A.Q. right up until the moment the planes hit the buildings. John Ashcroft said the main focus of the J. Dept. was porn. Also Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq even before 9/11, so no Iraq war.

If 9/11 had happened under Gores watch we would not have seen any kind of national unity in the aftermath, Gore himself said that if he had been president and reacted the way Bush did. The Republicans and the press "would have torn his skin off" and that would have been for waiting a month to go into Afghanistan. Expect the Republican house to start impeachment before the smoke clears.
 
1. 9/11 is happening unless a butterfly gets in the way like some Dem gets drunk at a victory celebration and kills Mohammed Atta in a car crash or something... But the bureaucratic roadblocks to catching the 9/11 terrorists were already in place and Gore would not have removed them.

Gore's reaction would be substantially similar to Bush's reaction but I'm not sure if the public will be as supportive especially considering many of the policy failures were the fault of Clinton and his team putting up the bureaucratic walls that meant evidence was ignored / not transmitted and Gore is to many a continuance of Clinton. Heck I can see a more draconian PATRIOT Act from a Gore overreaction in trying to break with Clinton which Bush didn't have to deal with.

Another interesting thing to speculate is from day 1 Bush tried to tone down anti-Muslim rhetoric as vs Islamic terrorism for various reasons probably both cynical (can't anger OPEC!) and virtuous. Gore isn't nearly as oil centered and I dunno if rhetoric might have been ratcheted up against Muslims or not.

2. Afghanistan was a done deal, Gore would have to invade whether he really wanted to or not at this point. Iraq would probably be bombed but not invaded.

3. As for economics the Gore tax cut would be smaller mostly because it would only have the middle class provisions of the Bush tax cuts (but honestly I can't see it being more generous than Bush's plan at any level, more it would be Bush - high earner cuts). The post 9/11 recession recovery would be softer and even though we wouldn't have the Iraq war debt I'd reckon that with the lower tax receipts from the softer recovery would mean deficits are about the same as Bush. The financial crisis still comes around due to the structural problems in existence (against the president who is in office in 2007), it probably isn't any worse than Bush and probably isn't worse relatively since the economy will not have grown as much as it did during Bush's administration...

I can definitely see Gore wasting lots of taxpayer dollars on his pet green projects like Obama is doing now, but the damage will be limited since I can't see any carbon credit trading scam or other really big initiatives being squeaked through congress...

4. Depending on how the fallout of 9/11 goes it could be either way... If he's managed it well he'll run again. If he's botched it he'll be seen as the worst president in history and we might be looking at President Lieberman running in 2004... I can't see him winning unless he's handled the domestic / foreign situation like Tiger Woods played a golf course in his prime...

5. The US situation in 2008... substantially similar regardless, a lesser financial crisis is offset by a weaker boom in the mid 2000's... both parties are full of incompetent dbags pulling for the status quo at this time whether it is Delay, Daschle, Frist, Pelosi, Hastert, Reid and the rest... this isn't going to change...
 

loughery111

Banned
What if Gore won in 2000? Let's say Clinton campaigned for him in the south and he got more votes, enough to win, how would the past ten years have gone for America?

I ask because I just finished watching the movie W., and although I think most of it was fictional, I came to the conclusion that I dislike the outcome of the Bush presidency, and I'm curious as to what a Gore presidency would bring us over the past ten years.

Some specific questions:

1. First of all, and most importantly, would 9/11 have occurred under a Gore presidency, and if so, how would he have reacted?

2. Would be be in Afghanistan or Iraq with a 9/11?

3. How would he have handled the economic situation that would develop into the recession?

4. Would he run again in 2004, who would run against him, and would he win?

5. Finally, regardless of a two-term presidency or not, where would the US be in the present after the impact of a Gore presidency compared to OTL?

I'm not playing up Gore as to be an awesome replacement to Bush, just curious as to an alternate outcome for events after 2000 if Gore wins.

1. Most likely (by which I mean almost no way it wouldn't), as there would be little time for Gore to shake things up enough at Justice and the intelligence agencies to suggest that they'd do anything differently. On the other hand, he isn't tossing the entire upper echelons out, so maybe they'll grow a brain while they're still there.

2. Afghanistan, certainly. Everyone will be out for someone's head. Barring that, people will want to destroy any group's ability to use Afghanistan as a base for training and recruitment. Iraq... no. A Gore government will not be as ideologically blinkered when looking at intelligence statements; or at least not in the same way.

3. As OTL, or so damned close that it won't make a bloody difference. Cyclical rise and fall is the rule in capitalism... this one was just made worse by the idiots who thought they could abolish that concept. Those idiots are still running things ITTL, so not much changes. And God knows the Democrats will have no more taste for the painful structural reforms that would ensure long-term prosperity, any more than the Republicans did IOTL.

4. Yes, McCain, I would imagine... I can't think, off the top of my head, of anyone else who wasn't in the middle of some other job at the time, and no, he probably wouldn't win. Damned hard for one party to stay in power for 16 years. There will be enough accumulated grievances to see him lose by this point, especially since he'll likely start tossing around his weight when it comes to environmental policy and the 2002-2004 recovery will be slower.

5. A little better in foreign policy, a little worse domestically. As usual, the idiocy the Democrats spout on the economy is dumber than the Republicans' idiocy, and their foreign policy is a little better, at least in this case. So not much difference, though the government's financial position may be marginally (read, a few percentage points of GDP) better off.
 
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