What if the rightful winner of the 2000 presidential election had been allowed to take office? How would our lives be different?
Here's a timeline of what could have been. (Updated as a new diary, as the original is too old to be updated.)
December 1, 2000: Sandra Day O'Connor has a horrifically vivid dream of how the
ascension of George W. Bush to the Oval Office would mean the
destruction of the American economy, the senseless deaths of hundreds
of thousands of people worldwide, the loss of American prestige both at
home and abroad, and -- worst of all -- the utter dissolution of her
beloved Republican Party as, upon being deserted by even the corporate
media, it suffers a series of definitive electoral ass-kickings in
2006, 2008, and 2010 before giving up the ghost. She goes on to
provide the swing vote that allows the Florida count to continue, thus
guaranteeing that Al Gore's election is confirmed. Media pundits
attack O'Connor so viciously that she decides to retire three weeks
later.
January 20, 2001: Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., is sworn in as the
forty-third President of the United States of America. His
election is widely condemned in the press as illegitimate despite his
solid majorities in both the popular and electoral votes, and despite
his high approval ratings.
January - February, 2001:
Not wanting to waste time trying to get his nominees past a
hostile Republican Congress, and not feeling the need for much
housecleaning in any event, Gore leaves in place his cabinet, as well
as the entire national security team he inherited from the previous
administration. He also continues the submarine watch that his
predecessor Bill Clinton had set to electronically monitor the
terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and his group Al-Qaeda in their
base in Afghanistan.
Even though Al-Qaeda has been linked to the failed 1993 attacks on the
World Trade Center in New York City, most media outlets choose to
ignore this fact, preferring to refer to bin Laden merely as a "Saudi
Arabian financier". Media pundits mock Gore for what they as his
paranoiac "wag the dog" efforts to distract attention from various
alleged scandals from his tenure as Vice President.
February through April, 2001: The members of the
Republican Congress, with the US corporate media backing them up, start
a barrage of conservative legislation -- tax cuts for the rich, gutting
environmental laws, et cetera -- that they plan to browbeat Gore into
signing. President Gore vetoes each bill and the vetoes are
sustained. He is called "obstructionist" by Tucker Carlson,
Robert Novak, and the spokespersons of the Heritage Foundation, the
Club for Growth, and the American Nazi Party.
April 1, 2001: As part of the Republican Congress'
campaign to sabotage the new President's legislative initiatives,
former Reagan and Bush administration officials Donald Rumsfeld, Dick
Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz are called forth from their corporate boards
to attack Gore's request that Congress move to pass laws freezing Osama
bin Laden's assets. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfowitz, who are all
members of a shadowy group known as the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC), accuse Gore of ignoring what they claim is a grave
threat emanating from Iraq's Saddam Hussein in favor of "casting
aspersions against a respected member of the worldwide financial
community", meaning bin Laden.
April 5, 2001: Scandal-plagued Louis Freeh, a Republican judge
who Bill Clinton had appointed as FBI Director as an olive branch to
the GOP, abruptly resigns from office before he could be fired.
In return for Gore's not charging him with any crimes, the
Republican Congress allows Gore's nominee, former Georgia Senator Sam
Nunn, to replace Freeh at the cost of only a week's worth of haranguing
on the Senate floor.
May 5, 2001: National Security chief Sandy Berger, at the urging
of his staffers John O'Neill and Richard Clarke, presents President
Gore with a PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) warning of imminent plans
by bin Laden to attack New York, America's financial center, with
hijacked commercial jets used as flying bombs. The suspicion is
that Al-Qaeda will try to succeed where they had failed eight years
earlier and attack the World Trade Center. Gore consults with former Senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Warren Rudman (R-NH), who chaired a terrorism commission formed by President Clinton in the late 1990s; they concur with the PDB's findings.
May 6, 2001: In response to the May 5 PDB, Gore orders the FAA
to implement the proposals made by his 1996 commission on airport
security, but which the Democratic party had backed away from after the
airlines had protested. Northwest and Delta Airlines further
weaken their precarious financial states by buying millions of dollars
of radio ads depicting the new procedures as wasteful and costly to the
air traveler. Gore, per O'Neill's and Clarke's recommendations, also
orders the FAA to watch for Middle Eastern students at flight schools
who are interested only in steering planes, not in performing takeoffs
or landings. On his syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh
proclaims that "Crazy Al Gore is out to kill off the airline industry!"
June 1, 2001: Republican Senators James Jeffords and
Lincoln Chaffee, disgusted with the demagoguery of the GOP, switch
parties and become Independents who inhabit the Democratic Senate
Caucus. This throws control of the Senate into Democratic hands.
June 5, 2001: Jobless numbers for the month of April fell
by 300,000, continuing a strong pattern of job growth that Gore
inherited from Clinton. New numbers from the Office of Management
and Budget indicated that Gore's fiscal policies were paying down the
Federal debt faster than predicted. Federal Reserve Chair Alan
Greenspan, noting that the soft economic landing of 1999 and 2000 had
been followed by the dramatic rise of the stock market in the first
months of the Gore term, warned yet again to beware of "irrational
exuberance".
July 10, 2001: Kenneth Williams, an 11-year veteran of the
counter-terrorism squad of the FBI in Phoenix, notified FBI
Headquarters that several Saudi, Algerian, United Arab Emirates and
Pakistani flight school students in his area could be followers of
Osama bin Laden, and that they might be terrorists learning how to fly
so that they could hijack a passenger plane. After interrogating
several of them and noting their hostility to the United States, he
recognized that these students were suspiciously well informed about
security measures at American airports. He suggested that the FBI
conduct a nationwide survey of Arab students who were attending
American flight schools; Director Nunn, after consulting with Sandy
Berger, agrees.
August 10, 2001: Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent in the Bureau's
Minneapolis offices, is contacted by John Rosengren of the Pam Am
International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. Rosengren
informs her that a student at the academy is not interested in learning
takeoffs or landings. Rowley investigates the man's background,
and discovers through French intelligence services that the student,
Moroccan-born French and British resident Zacharias Moussaoui, has
connections to Al-Qaeda. She orders his arrest and informs her
superiors of her findings, which are passed on to Berger, O'Neil and
Clarke.
August 13, 2001: Moussaoui, under FBI questioning, reveals key
details of an Al-Qaeda plot scheduled for next month to attack the
Pentagon, the White House and the World Trade Center. These
details are corroborated by the testimony of the students Williams had
interviewed in Phoenix a month earlier.
August - early September, 2001: Dozens of students at flight
schools are arrested in a major FBI operation. Thirteen of these
students turn out to be directly involved in what will come to be
called "the September Plot".
September 11, 2001: At the Houston, LAX and Minneapolis
International airports, seven Saudi and Algerian men were forbidden
from boarding their flights after airport security personnel found box
cutters, wire and other banned items on their persons. These men
turn out to be the remnants of the band of Al-Qaeda's September
Plotters; all the others had been caught in the FBI's sweep of the
flight schools.
Armed with this evidence, Gore demands and gets Congressional
authorization to send US troops to Afghanistan. MSNBC's Joe
Scarborough ridicules the idea that "idiots with box cutters" could
take over an airliner. Rush Limbaugh claims that Gore is "sending
our young men and women off on a wild goose chase." Bill
O'Reilly, William Kristol, and Ann Coulter demand that Gore invade
Iraq, even though none of the would-be hijackers is Iraqi or has any
connection to Iraq or to Saddam Hussein.
September 12, 2001: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan agrees
to a call by Madeline Albright, US Ambassdor to the UN, for an
international force to enter Afghanistan to root out Al-Qaeda.
France and Britain, whose intelligence services have worked
closely with US intelligence agencies, strongly back the Gore
Administration's position as copious evidence of planned Al-Qaeda
attacks in Europe has come to light. To buttress further the case
for invasion, well-documented human rights abuses committed by
Afghanistan's Taliban government, which is allied with Al-Qaeda, are
brought forth as evidence.
PNAC's Donald Rumsfeld, while taking care not to seem to oppose the
planned intervention in Afghanistan, goes onto Rush Limbaugh's radio
program to complain that even though Afghanistan's terrain is ruggedly
mountainous and therefore has proved to be historically less vulnerable
to aerial attacks than other, flatter nations, recent developments in
high-tech weaponry mean that the US need not send quite so many troops
Kabul's way -- and besides, the real problem is in Iraq!
September 16, 2001: 150,000 UN-led troops, 100,000 of whom
are US forces, leave for Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein, who as a
secularist Muslim leader despises Osama bin Laden and is in any event
eager to get back in the world's good graces, assists in setting up
staging areas Iraq for the UN. In Teheran, Iran's moderate
leadership, which needs the help of the world community in beating back
the conservative mullahs, agrees to let UN troops and planes pass
through Iran unhindered.
November 8, 2001: The first battle of the Al-Qaeda War is started.
November 18, 2001: Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants are
killed at Tora Bora after a weeklong battle. Afghanistan's
Taliban government, backed against a wall, agrees to step down; the UN
troops remain in Afghanistan until a civilian government is formed.
This ends the Al-Qaeda War.
President Gore and the UN announce a New Marshall Plan for Afghanistan.
Aid and aid workers, protected by the large troop presence, flow into the country.
On NBC's Meet the Press, PNAC's Dick Cheney, while applauding the death of bin Laden and the destruction of Al-Qaeda, complains that by allowing Iraq and Iran to assist in the effort, President Gore "has weakened America's moral
authority".
November 26, 2001: Federal charges are brought against Kenneth Lay and other employees of the energy giant Enron over seven
deaths that occurred in California over the summer due to heat stroke.
The victims, all of whom lived in parts of California which had
privatized their power utilities, had stopped paying their electric
bills when the charges topped $20,000 per month apiece due to
deliberate and illegal price and supply manipulations by Enron and
other private energy firms. MSNBC's Chris Matthews accuses the
Federal government of overreaching; FOX's Sean Hannity claims that
"Enron is being punished by the Socialist Al Gore for daring to prove
that capitalism works."
December 4, 2001: The investigation into Enron's price
manipulation reveals that, far from being a titanic moneymaker, Enron
and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen relied on heavily-cooked books
to create what one Enron employee would later describe as "illusory
profits". Enron, which was the darling of the pro-privatization
movement and which employed several prominent Republican
military-industrial complex activists such as Thomas White, promptly
collapses in a flurry of lawsuits.
January 22, 2002: President Gore in his State of the Union
speech informs the American people that the nation is more prosperous
than ever, and that more Americans than ever before are sharing in that
prosperity. Gore also touts the success in foiling the September
Plot and in tracking down and punishing "despoilers of the public
trust" such as the crooks behind Enron.
He also announces a plan, based on the one implemented in Vermont by
Governor Howard Dean, to bring universal health care to Americans under
the age of eighteen, and affordable health care to all adult Americans.
This plan, created with assistance from Gore's Vice President,
Joe Lieberman, relies on strengthening the existing health insurance
programs run by the states and uniting them into one cooperative
network. Republican Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott calls the
plan "yet another example of Democrats trying the same old kinds of
failed government programs." Private insurance companies
immediately start a multi-million-dollar TV and radio ad campaign
denouncing the plan as "something that will destroy America's high
standard of health care."
March 2, 2002: PNAC member and Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney is under investigation by a Federal grand jury for using shell companies to have oil dealings with Iran despite former President Clinton's 1996 Executive Order forbidding this. Fellow PNAC member Ahmad Chalabi, who is a convicted embezzler, denounces the action as "a naked attempt to silence a great humanitarian and his calls for a free Iraq."
May 1, 2002: The first troop withdrawals occur as a stable
civil government is formed in Afghanistan, thanks to the New Marshall
Plan and its emphasis on fixing the country's infrastructure.
November 5, 2002: The Miracle of 1998 -- where for the
first time in nearly two hundred years, the party of a sitting
president gained seats in the second-term mid-term elections -- is
repeated, and the Democrats gain firm control of both Houses of
Congress. Among the re-elected Democrats is Senator Paul Wellstone, who
chose not to go on a charter flight one day before the plane he was to
have taken crashed in a snowy field in northern Minnesota. Exit
polling showed that American contentment with the continuing
Clinton-era prosperity, combined with a successful fight against terror
and the Enron and Cheney scandals, helped put the Democrats over the
top. Religious-right leader Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress
Foundation laments the "pervasive immorality" in American culture that
fostered such a result.
January 20, 2003: In his State of the Union speech,
President Gore welcomes the new Democratic Congress and states that his
first order of business will be to ask that Congress to pass "The
Eisenhower Plan", which reinstates the Eisenhower-era taxation levels
on those making over $200,000 a year. The resulting increase in
tax revenue will wipe out all of the National Debt within five years
and enable, among other things, the financing of the proposed universal
child health care plan. Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott,
reviving Newt Gingrich's 1993 anti-tax battle cry, claims that this
will kill the American economy in six months if passed.
February 17-20, 2003: The Eisenhower Plan passes both Houses of Congress on party-line votes.
March 3-5, 2003: Gore's universal health care plan for children passes both Houses on party-line votes. Crossfire's Pat Buchanan decries this as "Socialism run amok."
April 5, 2003: Having waited for over two years for this moment,
President Gore nominates renowned Constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe
to take Sandra Day O'Connor's spot on the Supreme Court. After
two weeks of hearings, he is confirmed on a party-line vote. Dr.
James Dobson states that "with the nation's highest court overrun by
secular humanists, the End Times must be at hand."
May 9, 2003: The final US-led troops leave Afghanistan; a
token UN peacekeeping force remains to safeguard the new schools for
girls from the few remaining Taliban holdouts.
The General Accounting Office releases figures showing that the total
cost of the Al-Qaeda War and the subsequent occupation and rebuilding
of Afghanistan was $20 billion. Congressional Republicans raise a
stink about the excessive cost; Gore informs them that if he had
invaded Iraq, as they had wished, the cost would have been ten times
that, both in money and lives.
January 23, 2004: In his State of the Union Address,
President Gore describes the success of both the new Afghan government
and the new universal child health care plan. Public opinion
polls give him a 70% approval rating.
March 8, 2004: Backed with the assurance of continued Federal money from FEMA (which President Gore kept as a separate Cabinet-level agency despite calls from Republicans to abolish it), work on the repair of the levees of New Orleans is accelerated.
September 7, 2004: Levee repairs and strengthening is completed in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities.
November 5, 2004: President Gore handily wins re-election. Democrats have solid control of both Houses of Congress. The role of the nascent progressive media, including the liberal part of the "blogosphere" and the rise of Air America and Democracy Radio, are credited with aiding Gore's chances.
December 15, 2004: In exchange for his aid in rooting out Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay are encouraged by Gore and by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter to work out a plan for Iraq's transition to a secular democracy after Hussein's death, with Hussein and his sons in pivotal roles on the democracy commission. American conservatives immediately decry this as "appeasement", whereas Iraq-based observers congratulate Gore, Clinton and Carter for working on a plan to stave off the horrifically bloody civil war that would likely follow Saddam's death or removal from power.
January 25, 2005: As he basks in 75% approval ratings, President Gore's first SOTU after winning re-election focuses on the continuing Clinton Boom, the rapidly shrinking deficits, the success of the Lieberman-Dean universal child health care plan, and the steady growth of the economy, particularly in terms of jobs with living wages.
President Gore then announces a bold new initiative: He plans to expand the Lieberman-Dean plan to cover all adults as well. Insurance companies immediately roll out new "Harry and Louise" ads condemning Gore as the Antichrist.
February, 2005: Gore's expansion of the Lieberman-Dean plan passes both Houses of Congress on party-line votes.
March 3, 2005: Terri Schiavo, a woman left without any higher brain functions after a heart attack in 1990 destroyed most of her cerebral cortex, passes away quietly at a hospice in Florida.
From 2001 through 2004, Jeb Bush -- Florida's then-governor -- had blocked several court orders to remove her feeding tube. However, Jeb Bush was forced to resign in late 2004 on the heels of several different corruption and malfeasance indictments. The Schiavo case, along with the breaking news of born-again Christian Tom DeLay's corrupt involvement with prominent GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff (an Orthodox Jew and former yeshiva owner who used the public appearance of piety to facilitate his misdeeds), starts a public discussion on the hypocrisy of the religious right.
June 6, 2005: On the 61st anniversary of D-Day, President Gore announces "E-D-O-Day", marking the start of his push for ending American dependence on gasoline-fueled transportation. Republicans, particularly those from Texas and Lousisana, complain bitterly that "Gore is trying to starve us to death" even as companies like Shell and Texaco pull in record profits.
August 26, 2005: Hurricane Katrina, having hit Florida, sets its sights on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. FEMA's James Witt, with President Gore's full approval, had been in Florida since August 20; his proactive response is credited with keeping Katrina's Florida death toll to one person. Even as he coordinates the Florida FEMA effort, Witt directs Gulf Coast Air National Guard bases to have C-130 cargo planes filled with sandbags, food, water and other supplies to be sent to those areas in Katrina's path.
August 29, 2005: Katrina hits the Gulf Coast as a Category Three hurricane. Flooding kills seventeen persons, but forecasters say that it could have had a far deadlier impact if the wetlands and marshes protecting New Orleans -- marshes that under Clinton and Gore were protected and growing, after decades of shrinking at the hands of developers -- did not exist. The newly-refurbished levees in New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities hold firm; life is expected to return to normal inside of a week.
September 3, 2005: Chief Justice William Rehnquist dies after a long battle with throat cancer.
September 5, 2005: The port of New Orleans reopens after repairing the damage from Hurricane Katrina.
September 29, 2005: President Gore nominates Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Texas District Attorney Ronnie Earle to replace Ginsburg as Associate Justice.