It was a cold, blustery day as Al Gore stood to take the Oath of Office on January 21st, 2001. For the first time, the Reform Party would have their shot at the Presidency, breaking the stranglehold that the National Party had on US politics since the 80s. And might have had longer, had President Bush not been blown apart by an assassin's bomb in late 1995 in his third year in office, leaving Vice President Gingrich to ascend to office. Gingrich handled the job well at first, proposing his trademark Mars mission, generally conducting affairs successfully, and won in a crushing landslide in 1996.
Then the wind turned. The Reform Party had a slogan-“to dare more democracy”, taken from the SPD of West Germany. Ironic, considering that the original utterer of the slogan, Willy Brandt, was an uneasy partner in the original detente with the Soviet Union of the founder of the National Party. He represented to them the apex of National Gaullist style pseudo authoritarianism combined with the extreme hatred engendered by remnants of the Democratic Party. Once upon a time, there were two parties-Democrat and Republican. They both imploded under the weight of an assassination, an attempted firebombing of the Brookings Institution, a scandal involving a handsome serial killer working in the White House, a couple of failed Presidencies, a spy ring, and a desire to be a more “mature” nation. The opposite had happened in many regards, as the splinter parties grew more and more diverse. Paramilitaries and violence were commonplace, even though the US as a whole grew more stable and economically prosperous-some said too stable after the trying times of the late 70s and early 80s. Congress was widely despised after the initial weakening of Presidential power in the late 70s, thus the Imperial Presidency came back with a vengeance...
All this was helped by the... problems Gingrich had later in his term, thought John Lennon as stood the stage for a Beatles reunion. They had flown all the way from Jerusalem for this gig. It was such a nice, peaceful city under the Vatican-like status that had worked surprisingly well. More peaceful than DC, whose ghettoes resembled occupation zones...
Karl Rove, meanwhile stood in the distance. He could not believe this had happened. As one of the “spin doctors” in the administration, Rove had struck fear into political enemies, all the moreso when Lee Atwater passed away thanks to brain cancer. You crossed Rove lightly. He had done what he could, covering up the scandals of the Gingrich administration and the excesses of the national security state under the National Party. He had ruined a career or two. But sometimes, you couldn't fight everything. But they would be back-the Congress still had a fair amount of Nationals in them, and Gore had only won by a hair. Nearby, one of Rove's bodyguards dragged off one man who screamed he was pay his party back, how the late Lee Atwater (God bless his soul) had ruined his life, for getting him sued for sexual harassment, ruined his career, his wife got custody of Chelsea... Rove yawned. He heard it all before. The National Party, which had seemed invincible in 1996, was fractured with mass dissent rising between different factions. The bubbling had started after the death of “the Old Man” in 1994, who many suspected (correctly, as Rove well knew from his run-in with him in '92-he had never seen someone who was less inclined to gracefully retire) was playing the subtle puppetmaster and kingmaker all along with the National Administrations in the last ten years of his life. Then came Bush's death. Some began to question the party's increasingly privatized turn with the ascenion of Gingrich, and many questioned if the party was loosing touch with what made it great, the working-class, the lower-middle class, the immigrants who had increasingly gained wealth and were beginning to question if, like in 1959, it was time to aspire to something higher.
Gore proceeded to mention American values, specifically the question of supporting American values abroad, denouncing the Syrian Army's recent suppressing of protests in Beirut, with the unstated implication that the National Party had traditionally looked the other way. The Russian and Chinese ambassadors both looked upon him warily. While relations had gotten cooler if not openly antagonistic under the more hawkish Gingrich, they had grown accustomed to a mutually respectful and economically cooperative relationship with the Dole and Bush administrations, and it was no secret who they preferred in the election when the Reform Party began to bring up the issues of human rights.
The looks of the foreign ambassadors were tame compared to the losers of the election. Many of the Gingrichites were staring at Gore with daggers in their eyes. He was walking into a tiger pit. Gore was an acceptable choice for many National voters, as a Southerner and someone who had worked with them. Gore's fame to claim was the rise of the Internet, which he had gotten the Bush administration interested in. It was taking off. But he was a dedicated Reformer, which seemed all too much to remind them of the 60s, and what they fought against originally. The slogans at the convention halls... far too negative, openly stating what many old fighters in the party thought but weren't supposed to say. “Dope is an enemy of a strong society”. You weren't supposed to SAY that in the year 2000, you needed to just talk about stuff that got the press off your dick. What do you think that did to the younger generation who only knew prosperity?
Rove thought it was all so stupid. The leftist media was a problem, they made people think. He then surreptitiously put on a pair of headphones so he wouldn't have to hear those hippies yap. Joey Ramone was coming to join them, for Pete's sake-the singer of one of the world's most famous older rock band was a dedicated Reformer, of course... why did the damn guitarist have to get shot instead of him?
I'm BAAAACK... (Steven Tyler esque scream).