OK, I'm not continuing this timeline, but I will give a somewhat-but-not-really brief summary of what I believed would have happened had the timeline come to fruition.
---
After the election of Cuomo, he works much harder in passing progressive legislation than Clinton did IOTL; conservatives in the media such as Limbaugh go absolutely apeshit, beating even the paranoia the conservatives in recent years IOTL had about Obama. CuomoCare and and stronger Brady Act get rammed through.
Building on the paranoia, the Republican Revolution of 1994 is even more extensive- Michael Huffington beats Feinstein in California and Mitt Romney beats Ted Kennedy by the narrowest of margins in Massacussetts. Ron Paul wins his seat back. Both Bush sons win governorships instead of just George Jr.
But ominously, the militia movement also gets a boost from all of this. And they get one of their own into Congress also; Bo Gritz, who I made more successful in the 1992 Presidential election, wins a House seat from Utah as an independent.
(On the positive side, though, David Duke gets recalled from the Governor's Mansion in 1993, and is replaced by W. Fox McKeithen, a Republican, but the son of the widely respected former governor John McKeithen.)
Much of the militia violence is worse- for example, they don't catch Timothy McVeigh right after the Oklahoma City bombing, who goes on to start a "lone gunman" shooting campaign ala the DC Sniper IOTL.
The worst thing, though, is the 1995 assassination of Senator Bob Dole and Representative Karen Thurman, who happened to be having a conversation on the Capitol steps, by white supremacist James Von Brunn (of the OTL 2009 Holocaust Museum shooting).
In all of this, GHWB decides, due to Cuomo's unpopularity (unlike Clinton IOTL, he didn't even try to shift to the center after the 1994 midterm disaster for the Dems), he'll pull a Grover Cleveland and run for President again in 1996. After some token opposition from Alan Keyes (who, remember, is in Congress in OTL) and Pat Buchanan in the primaries, Bush wins the nomination and names Jack Kemp as his running mate to shore up the conservative vote (and, it must be said, to pick someone minority-friendly after the dodgy relations the GOP has had with the black community ITTL).
However, with Ross Perot unwilling, another man takes up the mantle of running as an independent in 1996- former California Governor Jerry Brown, who dislikes both Cuomo and Bush and thinks, in light of Perot's pretty good performance in 1992 (better than OTL), and independent has a legitimate chance at the nomination. He picks former Colorado Governor Dick Lamm as his running mate.
Brown wins several Western states including, critically, his home state of California, which throws the election to the House. With a Republican majority, Bush wins, but many Americans are dissatisfied with the way this turns out. Electoral reform might have become the big issue of the rest of the 90's ITTL had Bush not been shot by McVeigh while giving his inaugural address.
Jack Kemp becomes President. He nominates Colin Powell to be his vice president, who reluctantly accepts for the good of the country.
Meanwhile in Russia, the Communists win the 1996 election.
---
On that note, I'll stop right here and finish when I'm less tired, but I will say that although that while the things I have described here have been horrible, terrible things for the world (except, of course, for Duke being recalled), pop culture is somewhat better than OTL, with among other things:
-Quentin Tarantino's
Inglourious Basterds -in 1997
-James Cameron's
Starship Troopers (1999)
-Steven Spielberg's
Star Trek (2005)
-David Fincher's
Watchmen (2004)- with Edward Norton as Doctor Manhattan, Daniel Day-Lewis as Rorschach, and Sean Penn as Nite Owl (yes, this IS a low-probability TL)
-Guillermo del Toro's
Thor
-and, since George Lucas dies in the late 90s, Peter Jackson's Star Wars Prequel Trilogy- the first one being in 2007, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary (and to give Jackson time to do LOTR as per OTL)
Whaddya think?
