Plausibility Check :: Bush/Rumsfeld defeats Gore/Harkin

Penelope

Banned
Is it plausible that in a "Quayle dropped from the ticket" scenario, that incumbent president George H. W. Bush and his new running mate Donald Rumsfeld beat out Al Gore and Tom Harkin in 1992?

Ofcourse, Bush would only win by a Gore-Sized margin.
 
Gore winning the Democratic nomination is difficult but not impossible IMHO, he was a favourite of centrist party insiders when it looked like Clinton might be sunk by the 'bimbo eruptions'. Harkin is not a bad choice for VP; apart from some very minor controversy over whether or not he had misrepresented his naval service*, what stops him from getting onto the ticket? Being an agricultural state ethanol 'porker'?

Bush dumping Quayle is a distinct possibility.

But veep nominee Rumsfeld? I can't see that happening, he'd been out of government so long, he had very little profile by '92. When he was chosen as SecDef in 2001 it was a real surprise to political observers.


*A fighter pilot in the sixties, he flew combat air patrols over Cuba right after the missile crisis. Later on, as an anti-war activist, he'd spoken of flying CAPs over unnamed territory, giving the impression he might have fought in the Vietnam War (he didn't). I first heard of this around 2000 when I read a Rightwing Australian correspondent in the US write, IIRC, "Harkin used to tell people at cocktail parties he'd strafed Hanoi, when in fact all he ever did was shuttle damaged fighters for repair in Japan." This sounds like a gross embellishment of the man's supposed faux pas, and was such a baldfaced lie (I've looked for confirmation of this claim online, and all I can find is the fact Sen Barry Goldwater was upset at Harkin for not clarifying his service in Cuba vis-à-vis Southeast Asia), that it was too much even for the sewer of Ineternet 2.0...
 

Penelope

Banned
Hmm... Makes sense, well who would you suggest as Veep for Bush?

This is a very simple base POD for a timeline I might work on, so feedback would be greatly appreciated.
 
Powell was very popular at the time, but he was too far left on social issues for the Republicans to seriously consider him as a candidate. This is especially true when you already have a moderate at the top of the ticket. If Bush were to replace Quayle he would have to replace him with a staunch conservative. Buchanan is a possibility, but not a particularly likely one. Steve Forbes is another interesting option. I think the most likely option is exactly what happened: sticking with Quayle.
 
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