Today is the 10 year anniversary of Bush v. Gore which shut down the Florida recount after the 2000 election and set the stage for George W. Bush to rape the country for 8 full years.
It's something I have not been able to stop thinking about since yesterday. What if things had been just a little bit different?
What if Florida had modernized its voting system prior to the election and eliminated butterfly ballots? What if all felons in Florida had not been permanently disenfranchised following their release? What if Jeb Bush had not been governor of the state? What if Katherine Harris' plan to purge anyone with similar names to felons' from the voter rolls had been thwarted? What if Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist had recused themselves from the case due to their clear conflicts of interest? What if the Gore campaign had put just $1 million more into ads or GOTV activities in Florida? What if Nader had not been on the Florida ballot?
What would these past 10 years have been like? Would the 9-11 attacks have been prevented? Would we have spent trillions on tax cuts for the wealthy? Would we have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan? Might we have addressed global warming or reformed health care earlier, or prevented the financial collapse? None of these are sure things, there would have been a fighting chance.
Few people at the time considered 2000 a turning point election. I remember many people, even liberals, telling me they couldn't see any real differences between George Bush and Al Gore. Oh and even if Bush managed to get elected, he would govern as a compassionate conservative who wouldn't "engage in nation building." How wrong they were.
Seemingly insignificant events can change the course of human history but seemingly critical events can amount to nothing. There weren't a lot of progressives who didn't think the 2008 election would usher in a new era of progressive dominance. And yet, everything seems so hopeless now... who would have thought 2 years after the election of Barack Obama we'd be talking about extending the Bush tax cuts with 10% unemployment and little chance of robust recovery any time soon. Who would have thought Americans would vote in a group of Republicans that makes George Bush look moderate and reasonable. A group that openly ran on a platform of unwillingness to do anything about the economy during the worst recession in memory.
So what's my point? Of course we have to keep fighting. Things we do that seem insignificant at present become critical in retrospect and vice versa. As hopeless as things seem now and as helpless as we feel, the smallest things we do today can literally change the course of history. As disappointed as I am in President Obama's current defensive crouch and whining lack of leadership, I appreciate how much worse things would be with President McCain. We, progressives, put Obama in office. He will listen to us if we raise enough hell.
On this, the 10-year anniversary of the travesty that was Bush v. Gore, I'm consumed with regret over how far off the rails this country has gone in the past decade. I feel despair about all the lost opportunities and devastatingly stupid decisions that have been made in our name. Given the United States' recent track record, I can't help but dread the coming decade. But we can't change the past, we can only keep fighting for the country we know we can have some day.