Today in Alternate History
It’s very possible that had Teresa LaPore designed the Palm Beach County ballot differently, so as to make it clearer which line was for Gore and which was for Buchanan, that right now Joe Lieberman would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and that many of the people currently inclined to blog furious denunciations of Lieberman would be praising him.
Of course it’s also likely that a lot of the people involved in politics today, especially those of us who are progressive and on the younger side, wouldn’t be nearly as engaged as we are now if it hadn’t been for the 2000 farce, 9/11, Iraq, etc.
And of course there’s also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry’s offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way. That world would likely have involved a “troop surge” and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus (who, at the time, was a favorite of Bush-critical journalists).
40 Responses to “Today in Alternate History”
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October 30th, 2008 at 9:17 am
I’m only interested in alternate histories that involve time travelers giving machine guns to the South or aliens invading during World War 2.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Ooooh. The “What If” game.
If Gore won in 2000, chances are 9/11 probably wouldn’t have happened. (Anti-terrorist reforms wouldn’t have been put on the back burner), however I think that Gore would have over played his hand on the global warming issue a bit, leading for McCain to win a squeaker in 2004. McCain would be then be the one attacking Iraq, which would still be a quagmire, leading to Clinton/Bayh winning in 2008. To extend it a bit further, that particular ticket in this world would be unable to deal with the popping of the mortgage bubble (It would be pushed ahead a few years, but all bubbles have to pop), thus, losing in 2012. Opening the door for Jeb Bush. Who would win, and be unable to deal with the crisis either. Opening the door in 2016 for…Obama.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:23 am
“Joe Lieberman would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and that many of the people currently inclined to blog furious denunciations of Lieberman would be praising him.”
Nope.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Or what if we had a sane electoral system with instant runoffs? Even today, no one wants to dwell on the fact that Nader’s candidacy was one of the other critical factors that flipped Florida, and therefore, the election.
I think on the Florida debacle with great sadness. The machinery of our democracy collapsed eight years ago, the man who, in fact, won the election did not become President, and here we are today.
Bush likes to talk about the Judgement of History, fancying himself a later-day Truman. But of course the figure that historians are more likely to compare him with is Rutherford Hayes. There can be little doubt that 2000 and 1876 will be forever linked in the annals of our country.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:33 am
i don’t think there’s any alternate history in which joe lieberman does not reveal himself to be a despicable, smarmy, sycophantic, back-stabbing, republican putz.
it’s just an essential fact about him, true at all possible worlds.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Alex, Harry Turtledove is indeed awesome.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:34 am
Most everyone I know thought Lieberman was a douchebag back then, too, just not the gigantic ultra-hawk Republican douchebag he made himself.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:34 am
In my alternate history, my mother’s diet while carrying me to term doesn’t consist of Hershey Bars, Old Fitzgerald, and Pall Mall cigarettes.
Even today, no one wants to dwell on the fact that Nader’s candidacy was one of the other critical factors that flipped Florida, and therefore, the election.
Mostly, what flipped Florida was the unprecedented decision NOT to count unambiguous over-votes. Floridians had gotten into the habit of double marking ballots to eliminate any possibility of shenanigans. Ironic. So when Republicans scream about vote fraud they know whereof they speak.
October 30th, 2008 at 9:38 am
“Even today, no one wants to dwell on the fact that Nader’s candidacy was one of the other critical factors that flipped Florida, and therefore, the election.”
Go over to DailyKos and tell people that Gore mainly lost because of his flaccid, timid campaigning, and you’ll see how many people don’t want to dwell on Nader.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Re “that right now Joe Lieberman would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and that many of the people currently inclined to blog furious denunciations of Lieberman would be praising him.”
—————
This is utter bullshit. Lieberman always was a Republican mole.
Lieberman had the means to WIN the 2000 election for Gore — and chose to not use it.
In the months prior to Lieberman’s debate with Dick Cheney in Kentucky, the BIG STORY in Kentucky had been how Cold War workers at the Paducah, KY plant were being screwed by the Defense contractor running that plant. Workers at the plant, which refined uranium , were suffering crippling cancers of unusual nature. Workers health records were being destroyed — and the FBI raided the plant to grab computer records after word leaked of some being lost. An investigation disclosed pools of dangerous radiation both on and off the plant –plus a burial ground containing remains of nuclear weapons. The site had always been described as safe because it only refined uranium at low levels of concentration before shipping the ore on to Oak Ridge.
The Republican Congress was blocking requests by DOE Secretary Richardson to fund medical care and compensation for the workers who had helped win the Cold War– and who were now dying.
The Defense Contractor running Paducah? Lockheed Martin.
One of the people on Lockheed Martin’s Board of Directors? Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne Cheney.
I KNOW that Lieberman’s office got an email informing him of the above. If it had been revealed during his debate with Cheney — if Cheney had been asked why his wife Lynne was stabbing Cold War workers in the back — then Kentucky would have went for Gore.
Instead, Lieberman practically kissed Cheney on the mouth during the debate –both of them agreeing they had nothing to disagree about and both agreeing they had nothing negative to say about one another.
Lieberman’s shit-eating scum — and if God is just, Lieberman will scream in Hell for a couple of centuries at least.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Back in my “sensible Democrat” days I used to bang the anti-Nader drum, too, but you can’t blame Nader any more than you can blame the Socialist Party (which also got more votes than the margin in Florida). Gore was a bad campaigner, and wasn’t helped by the fact that he was running on the awkward legacy of a president whose policies were generally popular but who was personally disliked by a substantial chunk of the electorate. More importantly, the election was pretty decisively stolen when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris purged the voter rolls.
As for Nader himself, Clinton and Gore invited a left backlash by running the party far to the right. Welfare reform, the crime bill, AEDPA, NAFTA, DOMA, the various military interventions in Iraq (which inevitably paved the way for Bush’s war) - all of these and more represented ideological shifts to the right, far beyond what was politically necessary at the time, and a general “fuck you” to the left. It made no sense for anti-corporate, anti-globalization, anti-empire activists to vote for Gore in 2000; he had been thoroughly dismissing their concerns for eight years, precisely because it was assumed they’d always vote Democrat in the end.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I prefer the alternate history where Reagan wins the 1976 GOP nomination and loses the general election badly enough to discredit the far right for another generation.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:14 am
As far as alternate histories go, this is really best left to Harry Turtledove. I don’t know what Al Gore would’ve done as president. The notion that he’d somehow be able to stop 9/11 strikes me as unsupported speculation at best and absurd wish-fulfillment at worst. I don’t know that he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq, given that everyone who would’ve been advising him on foreign policy turned out to be major Iraq hawks in real life, and given that Gore himself was pretty hawkish on Iraq in the nineties. His opposition to the invasion in 2002 came in a very different environment than the one we’re considering here, in which he was removed from the bubble of the Washington consensus long enough to arrive at his own conclusion. Even removed from that bubble, he still supported - and supports, to my knowledge - the war in Afghanistan, which was also a predictable disaster.
His environmental record would’ve obviously been a hell of a lot better than Bush’s, and, I’m guessing, quite a bit better than Clinton’s, but whether he’d manage to get any serious global warming legislation passed over a Republican congress I’ve no idea. Trying to guess whether he’d be reelected in 2004 - much less whether his smarmy, mush-mouthed, uncharismatic VP would get the nomination after him - is even more of a fool’s game.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Lieberman couldn’t win the Democratic nomination for *his own Senate seat* and had to be reelected by Republicans defecting from their own party’s nominal nominee to band together against the real Democrat. Do you really see him winning a presidential nomination, even as a sitting VP?
The only reason he was accepted by the party base in 2000 was that he hadn’t revealed himself as a warmonger and/or the issue had little salience.
(Unless you’re assuming that in the Gore timeline, there was no 9/11 and therefore wars in the Middle East went right on having little salience. But then you should make that explicit, and even then, there’s a lot to dislike about Lieberman even if the Gore Administration was wildly successful.)
October 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
I see no reason to suspect that the FBI would have done any better heading off 9/11 under Gore then they did under Dubya.
On the other hand I really did believe that we would have boots on the ground in Colombia, having turned the War on Drugs from an exercise in police work to an actual military campaign.
“No legal controlling authority” is still going to be the epitat on Al’s grave marker.
I’d at least like the alternate history where Cheney grates on Dubya’s nerves and he makes another choice for Veep.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:43 am
That world would likely have involved a “troop surge” and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus
How do you know a Republican policy has been effective? When left-wingers like Matthew claim that - despite all the evidence that virtually the entire Democratic party opposed the policy - had the Democrats been in charge they would have implemented the policy too.
Let’s remember that when Bush actually implemented the surge, virtually every Democrat, including John Kerry and Barack Obama, voted to oppose the surge.
But I guess in Matthew-world, Democrats who opposed the surge would actually have implemented the surge! That’s surely what we call “Alternate History”.
October 30th, 2008 at 10:55 am
What if everything took place exactly as it did, except that in Palm Beach County just enough ballots put Gore over the top anyway.
VP Lieberman, having undermined his own campaign and proving to Pres. Gore that he is no asset in the administration, is replaced for the 2004 election with a young milquetoast midwest/souther Democrat.
Was it Evan Bayh, Tom Vilsack, or John Edwards?
October 30th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Okay, Joe Lieberman did run for President as a Democrat. He got zero delegates. That’s one less than one… zero. He got 9% in New Hampshire, 7% in Arizona, 11% in Delaware, 4% in Missouri, 3% in New Mexico, 1% in North Dakota, 6% in Oklahoma, and 2% in South Carolina. He proceeded to drop out on February 3. “Joementum” became a famous sarcastic expression due to the abject failure of his campaign. It was a whole thing.
If, prior to that, he had been the winning VP candidate rather than the losing one, everything would be completely different? People would now like him, ENTIRELY based on that? The guy who got zero delegates in an open field, would have won?
I find this unlikely.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:34 am
What’s funny to me is that not only is the blog post title the name of my old web site, but many of the alternative scenarios mentioned in the comments have already been explored there… small world
October 30th, 2008 at 11:40 am
And congratulations to the Montreal Expos for finally bringing a World Series championship to Quebec!
October 30th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I’d be interested in an alternative history involving aliens invading during the Civil War. Machine guns are optional.
October 30th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Re Delicious Pundit’s comment “congratulations to the Montreal Expos for finally bringing a World Series championship to Quebec!”
————-
Wha? They have female baseball teams now?
You must be very proud, madam.
Don Williams
Philadelphia, PA
October 30th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
PS Maybe you should change your starting pitcher — he throws like a girl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BushAsAPitcher.jpg
October 30th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I don’t think it would change much
Look, in Hillary Clinton, Obama beat someone who many say was practically VP. I could see Obama running a similar insurgency campaign against a VP Lieberman. It might even be easier, since Clinton is a bigger name, got lots of female votes, and play
October 30th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
. . . and plays better than Liberman in Appalachia
October 30th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Let’s say Gore wins. I still say 9/11 happens (despite everyone’s best efforts). Gore gets blamed for it by the news media and the Republicans, and middle-of-the-road Dems go along with the outcry. Amid all the tumult, Gore resigns in hopes of providing some calm and stability and putting aside partisan nastiness. Lieberman becomes President in ‘02 with a hawkish VP (Bob Kerrey, perhaps) and prosecutes the Iraq war. Lieberman loses to McCain in 2004, McCain promising to run the war better. The war doesn’t run better. McCain loses in 2008 to an antiwar candidate. I don’t know if it would have been Obama, because I don’t think Obama would get a high-profile speaking slot at a Lieberman convention.
October 30th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I still say we are in the alternate history, with no way back to the real one. Depressing thought, I know.
We’ll just have to fix the history we’re in, real or alternate.
In the real history, of course, President Gore, on receiving a certain PDB, rallies the troops, and the word rapidly goes down through all the bureaucracies that information relating to possible terrorist attacks is worth a bonus at least, and a promotion at best. An FBI supervisor who’s been sitting on some good stuff that his subordinates have been agitating about suddenly realizes what he’s got hold of, and word of Arabs learning to fly, but who don’t care about how to land, finds its way to the Oval Office.
The plot gets thwarted, and there’s never a convincing reason to invade Iraq. Without the Bush tax cuts, our budgets are more in balance, and without so much money sloshing around at the top, the real estate bubble still happens, but not nearly as dramatically. The realization that climate change is real finally starts sinking in about 2007, like it did in this reality, but like any lame duck, Gore isn’t able to do much about it. The subprime/credit crisis of 2008 still happens, but though a much smaller bailout of ~$300B actually fixes the whole thing, it’s still enough to cause Lieberman to lose to Romney in 2008.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I like your real history, low-tech, but Lieberman loses to Jeb Bush in 2008, as the Bush name isn’t poisoned like it is now thanks to 8 years of Dubya.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Recently over on Instapundit, he linked to somebody answering that question that I’m sure has kept a lot of us up at night, “What if Steve Forbes had won the Presidency in 2000?”
I kid you not.
In this particular contrafactual, the 2008 election finds us exporting prosperity around the world, and no mention is made of 9/11 or Iraq.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Thanks, for recognizing that a simple design flaw by an unqualified amateur changed history. Until we get serious about setting up some national standards for states to use in handling elections, the same type of screw-up is likely to happen. In fact, it may be happening right now and we just don’t know about it yet. Hope for a landslide, so it won’t matter.
October 30th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
If Gore had won in 2000: there would still be a surplus, 9/11 would still have happened, and the US would be fighting in Afghanistan but not in Iraq. And Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, not Joe Lieberman, as the party would want a fresher face (just as the GOP isn’t running Cheney, and Biden wouldn’t run in 2016 if Obama got two terms).
And the economic crisis would very likely still have happened, and the current election would thus be very close.
The Kerry/McCain scenario is simply not realistic. As many, MANY people have pointed out in this campaign, McCain agrees with Bush and the Republicans on most issue, including pretty much every economic issue. Being bitter about 2000 and defending Kerry from smears doesn’t make him a Dem, it just means he believes (believed?) in fair play.
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