Matt Yglesias

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).

What Might Have Been

Kevin Drum asks:

Now, suppose Kerry were running this year and therefore had the following three advantages over his previous self: (a) he was running after eight years of Republican rule instead of four, (b) the economy sucked, and (c) he had a fantastic fundraising advantage over his Republican opponent.

Question 1: how well do you think Kerry would do? Question 2: how well do you think Obama is going to do this year? Question 3: how big is the difference between the answers to Q1 and Q2?

I think (c) shouldn’t be added into the experiment. You can’t treat Obama’s spectacular fundraising success as exogenous to his individual appeal as a candidate or to his campaign’s particular organizational and tactical gambits. Rather, I think the way to specify the hypothetical would be to wonder what would have happened if instead of offering tepid support for the war and running for president in 2004, Kerry had offered mild opposition to the war and ran for president in 2008. I think he’d be doing pretty darn well, though presumably with a slightly different electoral coalition behind him than Obama has.