How would Al Gore have delt with the past 17 months?

The US probably would have not abdicated its role in trying to facilitate peace in Isreal which might have lessened the impact of the intifada.

The US probably would not be rushing headlong into a war in Iraq thereby maintaining the world sympathy post 9/11 and thereby maintaining world support (including most of the Muslim world) for its ‘War on Terror.’

This is assuming 9/11 would have happened under Gore. 9/11 was preventable.

two things that i am sure of, though -- (a) there'd be none of this Iraq nonsense; (b) while the economy might not be booming as it was in the late nineties, it would be more vigorous than it is today (i.e., no stupid, needless tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans). i leave it to others to speculate on the interconnections between (a) and (b), of course.

(As this is a pointless exercise, why should I take it seriously? Improve the bed you're in instead of mooning over the bed that was discontinued 17 months ago.)

Space shuttle explodes - investigation begins within 48 hours

Sept. 11th disaster - almost TWO YEARS before investigation begins (and Dubya tries to appoint Henry "Lies-R-Us" Kissinger as the chair!?!?!?!?!? WTF!?!)

Clinton bombed lotsa people (in lotsa ways, har har).

I agree with those who say that Iraq wouldn't be an issue as it is now. (Perhaps it was an issue in the Clinton years, but in a very different sense.) That in itself represents a major difference to me.

We were dealt this hand of cards by a combination of the voters and corruption. What's the next step to deal with the resultant mess?

... which is a different thing than mounting an invasion of the country, which is what Bush II is proposing ...

he also bombed Bosnia and probably more places.

actually, Clinton bombed Kosovo and Serbia, not Bosnia (though he probably should have bombed Bosnia, which would have probably eliminated the need to bomb Kosovo and Serbia). do you think that Milosevic should have been allowed to continue what he was doing in Kosovo?

oh yeah, some of those other "places" included Afghanistan and Sudan -- where al-Qaeda and Osama were hanging out.

Why would Gore have done anything different?

because (a) the economy wouldn't be in the toilet and (b) afghanistan wouldn't be such a fucking mess (and there'd be no need to deflect attention from either)?

oh gee, a Naderite. that explains everything

Though Bush is scary, and has been since his first week in office.

thank Ralph for putting him there ...

NB: Gore was (or at least vociferously claims to have been) in favor of getting rid of Saddam way back when.

all of Jeb's finnagling would have been for naught had Nader not ran ... not to mention that Gore would have won New Hampshire, and Florida would have been irrelevant as far as determining who won the election.

re the economy: the one thing that Gore would not have done was ram through the large tax cut. which means that there probably wouldn't be the large deficit we have right now (which in turn means that the Bushie poor-mouthing going on right now would be less credible). and more direct stimulus (i.e., direct funding to states running their large deficits) would be possible. though exactly how the economy would fare is largely speculative, i agree.

He really was, to a point. For him to claim now that he was seriously "disappointed" that Bush I didn't go all the way to Baghdad, however, is disingenuous, since he did voice this disappointment very strongly back in '91.

Anyways, I agree that we wouldn't have this Iraq business. Gore was and is not an isolationist or a "peacenik" by any means, but I think he would have had enough respect for other nations of the world not to try to establish a case for war on such flimsy pretexts as Powell et al are doing at present.

Also little (yet not-so-little) things like taking all DOE studies that disagree with the Bush II "No Child Left Behind" policy off of the DOE website wouldn't have happened. Nor would we be seeing familiar faces like the aforementioned Henry "Warrant Out for My Arrest in Several Nations" Kissinger or John Poindexter.

Another reason why the question's not pointless could be that it's interesting. If you don't find it interesting, then possibly it's pointless. The question 'what shall we do now?' is a separate question, with its own urgency and difficulty.

The fact that Clinton and Gore had different approaches to the Middle East, and other places, from what some of us would like does not mean that their approach was the same as Bush's. I stand by the view that Gore's policy on Iraq would have been very different from Bush's, though policy on other places might not have been. I don't seek to defend the ongoing bombing etc of Iraq (and other places) during the Clinton years, but it remains *distinguishable* from (and I think preferable to) the current cataclysm.

Basically, ignore me until the nukes go off.

perhaps, but the ILXor Republicans have not yet shown up in this thread.

And the question isn't "would Gore have done better" -- which yeah, would totally fall along party lines -- but what specifically would he have done. I'm not sure he'd have followed down some Democratic template response any more than Bush has followed down a template Republican one.

(Oh plus Keith: the thing that gets me about saying "deficits aren't as bad as the 80s" is that the Bush budget policy seems to me to be the same as Reagan's -- "if you don't like big government, get rid of all the money and you won't be able to afford it anyway.")

There have been some subtle nuance changes for Bush post-9/11, but I don't think there's much we're seeing now that wasn't already there. It's more a question as to how cynical (or brilliant, depending on your POV) his campaign was run.

I can't claim to be really familiar with the details of the Reagan budget, but my guess is that most of the spending that came from him (and not from Congress) was aimed at things like business and defense, not things that fall under the umbrella of what gets called "big government." This tends to be the explicit trade-off with people who campaign that way: I suppose I have to give them the credit of admitting that they do say "you know how to use your money, not the government" before they proceed to slash out everything the government was using your money to do for you. (When it comes to what it does for Lockheed-Martin these guys have slightly less faith in the public's good judgment.)

I suppose I have to give them the credit of admitting that they do say "you know how to use your money, not the government" before they proceed to slash out everything the government was using your money to do for you.

Well see that's where I differ: I think the whole "It's your money" claim of Dubya circa '00 was cynical. He kept going on and on in the campaign about how government is ineffective and doesn't belong to the people WITHOUT saying that if that's so, why in the world he'd want to lead said ineffectual government. I think it's the most cynical thing to say to citizens in a so-called democracy, and it (still) aggravates the hell outta me that Al Gore didn't call him on it.

You're right, Gore could indeed have done a much better job about calling Bush on things like that. What disappoints me so greatly is that on a national level all sorts of room is left for that vague rhetoric: in state and local elections and debates, anyone who said "have your money back" would immediately be hounded with "what are you going to cut? what are you going to cut?" over and over until they could provide a sensible answer. In presidential elections people are allowed to blow all sorts of rosy-sounding rhetoric and never asked about the downside.

So no, I don't believe Republicans, in truth, trust the common people. I do believe that they use this faulty reasoning to convince the common people to fuck themselves in order to give the wealthy people more power and say in goverment. And after a certain point of superfluosnes, that's what more money equates to, more power. "Oh sure Common Joe, here's a tiny morsel back of your shit salary. See, isn't that nice? Now your family can have a vacation and visit the local theme park. Yay. And look, now the wealthy members of the nation have more power and control." What a fantastic trade off!

Not that I think the dems are any better.

Um, Gore would have propably done the same exact stuff. The Right would be unsatisfied and argue that he hasn't done enough, and the Left would be grateful that Bush wasn't in office so that we won't be forced to lunge forward into WWIII. Uh...yeah!

More pointles-pointles pointlesnes Lieutenant Poop Scoop. Please, prepare troops for advance.

As it happens, I'm surprised at how many people on this thread have identified themselves as Democrats - I don't think as many UK posters would side so strongly with Labour or the LibDems in a more Anglocentric political thread. This is one possible reason why the thread has run into "Gore would have done X good thing as opposed to Bush doing Y bad thing". I think Nabisco and the Pinefox are pretty much OTM though.

Oh, you're not a rightwinger? Then stop doing their goddamn work, fool.

Ironically, we might have a situation in this country soon enough where a new right-wing party splits the Tory vote. When this happens I reserve my right to gloat gleefully ;-)

Actually, ignore that bit, I've just remembered that the secret of New Labour's electoral success was that it split the right-wing vote for itself.

*Given its impact on the course of the thread so far, a Perry-sized pall is approximately the size of a hummingbird.