President John McCain: 2000-2008

And, Ashcroft is no guarantee.

Ashcroft is a more likely pick for VP actually. He considered running a presidential campaign in 2000 before announcing in 1999 that he would focus on his Senate seat. (A wise decision in the event) If Bush went under a bus in 1998 or so, he would probably have been the frontrunner and McCain's main challenger.

He would probably have been McCain's default evangelical/base VP pick. But I don't know if McCain could stomach him to put him on the ticket.

But if McCain "sails into the nomination" with no 'agents of intolerance' speech, then I don't see why he wouldn't pick Fred Thompson.
 
A few comments:
Neo-Confederates and Neo-Conservatives are not necessarily the same. (Lott's the former, McCain's allies are the latter.) Try and disambiguate them.
If McCain was nominated, it would be far likely that Florida would be a lot less close. He was far more popular than Gore in 2000. (Though the African-American vote would be almost all for Gore, with Lott on the ballot.) Plus, Harris would be a lot less enthusiastic to campaign for McCain, since she was such a Bush supporter. (And, given McCain's calls for an investigation of the SC Poll Closings, he'd shy away from things like the "felon list*".) You'd still have the butterfly ballot, though.
First off, Rove may not have been willing to work with Lott without a major backlash from McCain. He was mad as you-know-what over what Rove did to him in SC. And, there were enough damaging things about Gore to sink him IRL (Occidental, Campaign Finance) even with a weak candidate like Bush**!
With Hunter as SecDef, and Cheney out, you may have nearly butterflied away Iraq.Of course, since McCain did make no bones about his "Rogue State Rollback" plan...

* Said list is in quotes due to it containing people classified as felons who A. Were only convicted of misdemeanors B. Were of a different race or age C. Were convicted in the "future" (I.E. after 2000)
** Of course the media didn't ask about Bush's questionable NG service, his possible perjury in the Eliza May case, his possible drug use, and the poll closings in SC.
 
Neo-Conservatives used to be left-wingers, with some of them being dissident Communists like Trotskyists. Pat Buchanan referred to them as the "boat people of the left." They're more into Big Government if it suits conservative ends and they're less concerned about social conservatism.

(At least some of them are Jewish, which leads to critics of anti-neoconservatism to claim "neoconservative" is some kind of anti-Semitic code word.)

Neo-Confederates are an entirely different animal. They're militantly Southern, for example.
 
Top