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What if...Gore had been elected president?

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by Batman, Jun 11, 2008.

  1. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    The Dixie Chicks keep selling an ass-ton of albums year after year.
     
  2. Pilot

    Pilot Well-Known Member

    The McCain point is valid, and interesting. For argument's sake, I'll assume Gore's domestic concentration and the notion of Democrats being less patriotic would have made him vulnerable to a guy like McCain in 2004. Would McCain have had to swing as far right as he has in search of Republican votes? Would he have had to pull as close to the establishment as he has, or would we have had the chance to vote for the guy we saw in 2000?

    Could he, in 2004, have created a coalition of moderate voters rather than the extreme separation we seem to have now?
     
  3. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    That's one benefit I think we'd have gotten out of a Gore presidency, is that I believe he would've helped bridge that separation. Not by anything he did or didn't do, mind you, but just by there being no controversy surrounding the election.
    The worst thing that ever happened to Bush was winning Florida by such a close margin. Coming off the Clinton years, and with the popular vs. electoral vote debate hanging over him, Bush didn't have a chance in hell of appeasing Democrats. And for eight years, they've been unable to let it go. Every Bush screw-up brings another call of "Bush wasn't elected anyway."
    If Gore wins Florida, he wins the election cleanly and that is not an issue. There's still a divide but, barring a total meltdown in office by Gore, it's no worse than it was in 2000 and it's business as usual.
     
  4. Armchair_QB

    Armchair_QB Well-Known Member

    If Gore wins by the same electoral margin as Bush did he would have had no more of a mandate than Bush, regardless of the popular vote.
     
  5. dixiehack

    dixiehack Well-Known Member

    You really think that if the Supreme Court vote had gone the other way that Republicans would not have raised at least as much sand, if not more so, than the Democrats did in real life? Talk radio would have sounded like a howler monkey preserve.
     
  6. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    If Gore had been the one with the 600-vote lead in the first place, it would not have been nearly as bad. He did win the popular vote. Bush won the electoral. If Gore wins Florida, and the recounts stayed the same (all of which showed Bush winning, BTW), then no, I don't believe the Republicans would've been as outspoken as the Democrats have been. They'd have been pissed, and surely would've done their best to undermine Gore's more liberal proposals (like anything having to do with global warming legislation), but there wouldn't have been as much controversy. Bush wouldn't have had a leg to stand on.
    I just think Republicans would have taken it in stride more than Democrats have. One thing I've noticed over the last eight years is that, when Republicans lose elections, they tend to take the approach of "Well, we lost, it sucks, Democrats suck, but we'll get them next election cycle. Until then, we'll tell people what a bunch of crooks the Democrats are."
    Democrats tend to take the approach of, "Well, we lost, it sucks, Republicans suck, but we'll see what we can do to get our way through the courts. And have we mentioned that the Republicans really, REALLY suck?"
     
  7. snuffy2

    snuffy2 Member

    Totally misleading post. It was the Dems who caved to the Brooks Brothers SS attack on elderly poll workers and shut down of democratic counting of votes in Dade County. That awful event in American History followed months of systematic purging of democratic voters using Florida state agencies including DMV and prison industry records to strangle 'democrat' votes. To say that Republicans would have accepted a loss and walked is a total distortion of proven history http://www.democrats.com/joel-kaplan
    these rewrighters of history insult our understanding of fact. The Dade County silver spoon riot was the single incident where my apolitical politics took a permanent left turn.
     
  8. writing irish

    writing irish Active Member

    Gore wins, 9/11 still happens, we still go into Afghanistan, we don't invade Iraq. I don't know enough about Gore's foreign policy attitudes to know how well we would have handled Afghanistan, but of course we would have done better with Gore than W. Even without knowing a whole lot about the specifics of Gore's worldview, I would trust the guy to do a better job of listening to the military and to genuine foreign-policy experts instead of ideologues posing as international-relations visionaries.

    Still, 9/11 happening under Gore's watch would guarantee a Republican victory in 04, even if Gore handled the post-9/11 situation well. Who the GOP would have nominated in such a situation, I won't guess. Much of the public would have blamed Gore for 9/11 in the same way that Carter was blamed for the Hostage Crisis. He'd have lost in 2004, regardless of the economy or anything else.
     
  9. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    Violence, hunger, disease and ignorance would be unknown as the entire world celebrated the golden age of the Pax Gorean.
     
  10. RedSmithClone

    RedSmithClone Active Member

    Now that would have been nice.

    And who's to say Lieberman, with his FP stance wouldn't have been elected and thrown Gore under the bus?
    I mean that is what Lieberman is all about, throwing Dems under the bus. Right?
     
  11. three_bags_full

    three_bags_full Well-Known Member

    The world was alienated well before March 2003.
     
  12. JayFarrar

    JayFarrar Well-Known Member

    Lieberman is only about himself, so anything is possible.
     
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