NostALgia
Al Gore is much in the news, with his all-but-won-the-Oscar documentary An Inconvenient Truth. He says he will not run in 2008 and I'll take him at his word. (That was a joke, son.)
Apparently, Gore now feels he should have been more passionate in the 2000 election. With the results so close, I suppose it's natural to second guess. My guess, however, is he got about as many votes as he was gonna get.
After all, he did get more votes than his predecessor, and more votes than his opponent. Though Gore had a good economy to run on, Clinton had turned off a lot of people, and the public wanted a change. Also, he (or some Democrats somewhere) timed the release of the Bush DUI story right before the election, so it was fresh on everyone's mind. This hit at Bush's greatest weakness--he was untested on a national level, so people weren't sure if he was personally up to the job. I'm guessing this move alone gave Gore more than a million net votes.
If he had been more passionate, Bush probably would have been able to beat him over the head with it. His passion is global warming, and I can see the ads now--"if Gore is elected, gas prices will rise so high they'll be" as big as they actually are now. Gore would have lost Michigan right there. He also would have lost all those retirees in Miami on fixed incomes who mistakenly voted for Buchanan.
"For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been!'." All the more reason not to fool yourself.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:52 AM
3 Comments:
Trying to rewrite history based on changing one or two key factors is tough. Especially looking with hindsight. It may make for interesting sci fi & alternate history books, but its hopeless in real life. Al Gore is popular now with his movie due to a confluence of many factors but also to the fact the fact that he lost, is not perceived as a mealy-mouthed politician scamming for votes and being "out of power' is safe to like. Had a few Flordians gone the other way (or been counted that way ) in 2000, its easy to see Al and George in reversed positions (though I'm guessing George would be leading up steriod investigations or some such around now)
I agree this sort of speculation is best suited for sci-fi novels. Just today in Slate Jacob Weisberg repeated the silly meme that Gore would had to have been better than Bush as Prez. He goes on to state that he doubts Gore wouldn't have gotten us involved in an Iraq failure as Bush did. This is just silly. First, I shudder to think how bad things would be going for us if we let Saddam Hussein stay in power. Second, if Gore did go into Iraq, I bet Bush would have beat him in 2004. Third, since there was no way the UN would go along with us, if we were to go in, I don't think the war would have turned out very differently (or better) with anyone else in charge--in fact, if anything, Gore as a Democrat would feel the urge to cut and run much more strongly.
But we'll never know. I only offer this speculation to respond to the widespread yet insane speculation from the anti-war side.
In the note above, I meant to write "...if Gore didn't go into Iraq..." Freudian slip? No. Sometimes a typo is just a typo.
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