Greetings from my universe, parallel to yours. I blog on our version of Daily Kos. (Ours is the Daily Jerome; I'm still unclear on how the divergence of our timelines ten years ago led to that difference, among many others.) I am the analogue to your diarist "Seneca Doane." We've been doing some great work since 2007 in traversing the multiverse. I was chosen as one of those to make contact. I've been lurking (get it?) in "Seneca's" unconscious mind for some time now, seeing your world through his eyes, and I just took over the cognitive controls for the occasion. I roused him from his bed, logged into his account through his fingertips (technically he's sleep-blogging, and not for the first time) and prepared to announce my presence to you on this momentous tenth anniversary of the day that Al Gore was announced as the winner of the 2000 Presidential election -- in my universe, that is. Having looked around yours for a while, I thought you could use some cheering up.
Ours are not the only two universes out there, of course. In most of the universes we've visited so far, Gore won on Election Night itself. That "butterfly ballot" problem was a pretty rare mutation, though it affected both yours and ours. There are universes where Bush won outright on Election Night as well. Then there's the wacky universe where Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's tie-breaking decision in Bush v. Gore tried to split the difference by dictating for the next four years Gore would be President from 3 a.m. Sunday through 3 p.m. Wednesday every week, with Bush being President for the other half of the week. That arrangement didn't last long -- being able to compare their performance in juxtaposition like that led to a Democratic landslide in 2002. The new Congress decreed that a new three-day week: every day was either Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. Technically, Bush remained President for three hours in the morning every third day, but Congress had correctly guessed that over the next two years Bush would never once be able to stay up late enough to take advantage of it.
Your universe is one of the few that we've bothered to name – or actually nickname. Some call it the "Wistful Timeline," for reasons I doubt I have to explain. Others call "HotMerica," because you lacked President Gore's leadership on global climate change. Our estimates show that our realities are already diverging in that respect. I just thought you should know.
I would not say that everything is peaches and cream in my home universe. We grouse a lot, like people always do. The news of the divergence in timelines, though, and of what is happening with you guys, has had a great impact on people. It's impolite to say "There but for the grace of God" to someone's face, but as I don’t know if and when I’m coming back I think I owe you candor. (Anyway, with your technology, you're not exactly going to be able to come find me and complain. No offense intended.) Once my reports were verified by a few other travelers who had previously doubted my story, we perversely became a lot happier. Our Dick Cheney apologized for what he had done in your timeline. (It was the only way he could tamp down the jeering crowds.)
We barely knew who our Osama bin Laden was before we started visiting there, but he's had a lot of explaining to do here once the news traveled around. Our political scientists have been rattled; so much of our understanding of the innate structure of the our political system – from checks and balances to prohibitions on torture – turned out to be more fragile than a 25-cent Christmas ornament. (That reminds me: our Chinese want to say “hi” – and “thanks!”) We write and think about you a lot.
We have our own Barack Obama too, of course. He’s a really nice guy. He's been on the talk shows a lot since our first contact with you. He was joking the other day that he always knew that he was destined for great things, but he just didn't know that to get there he had to stop teaching at U of Chicago Law. He lost to Bobby Rush here in 2000 also, but in the quiet times of the early Gore Presidency he just stayed in the State Senate. Without a 9/11, without an Iraq War, there was no “I’m against dumb wars” speech. He was finally elected to the U.S. Senate just this year, defeating Senator Jack Ryan, based on his notoriety from being your President. And he wrote that second book, too.
He and Michelle send their regards, by the way. They’re very happy here.
I guess I gave away some things just there – differences between our timelines. I realize that I’ve been avoiding this. Unlike your Seneca, I’m not usually this chatty, but this is hard. OK, let’s get to it.
Where to begin? Well, in our timeline, for one thing, Bush v. Gore came out differently on December 12, 2000, and Gore won the Electoral Vote by a comfortable margin. Bush kept on fighting, of course, but after a while he came to be seen as an embarrassment even to his own party. Not as big a one as yours, of course, but big.
So Gore took office. Lieberman too, of course. I'll tell you, when word came out about what your Lieberman has done over the past decade, our Lieberman became really embarrassed. He has been in seclusion, actually, for the past few years. He expected to run for President in 2008, but the opening of the multiverse the previous year completely torpedoed him. In one of the first parallel universes we found, nicknamed “Droopy Dog,” he had actually become President in 2005 when Gore refused to run for re-election. It was based on a point of honor after U.S. soldiers had been caught torturing prisoners in Kamchatka (and just be glad you don't know about that mess!) He felt that he had failed in his responsibility to stop them, that the buck stopped with him, so he refused to run.
Three years of a Lieberman Presidency had totally screwed up that U.S. When our Lieberman found out that his approval ratings there were below 18%, he sort of lost it. (He's pretty thin-skinned in every universe we've found.) They brought back Gore, who was willing to admit he had made a mistake. He negotiated an end to the war in Northeast Asia within months and no one smirked when he got the Nobel Peace Prize. (He hadn’t received the first one because he hadn’t made An Inconvenient Truth – there was no need, him being President and all. I did transcribe it for him, though, and he loved it!)
There I go, another digression. I’m sorry.
There are some indications that our universes actually diverged a little before Dec. 12, actually. The first big difference was that a case brought before a state court judge in Florida let to an injunction against purging real voters off of the voter rolls. Pretty standard stuff. Jeb Bush was pissed off at the time, but what could he do? When he found out about your universe …. Actually, it’s never funny when someone flips out like that. The recorded calls from his brother chewing him out, though -- those were funny. Our George W. is a little less circumspect than yours.
9/11 didn’t happen. There, I said it.
We were stunned when we found out about it. Gore didn’t even remember the cable that National Security Advisor Richard Clarke flagged for him in 2001; Clarke only remembers it vaguely. With the continuation of Clinton’s anti-terrorism policy, stopping the bin Ladin attacks before they began was fairly routine. The hijackers ended up not even going ahead with it. Some of them have died otherwise here; the others, understandably, aren’t giving interviews. Bin Laden died of kidney disease, a frustrated man. And yes, American relationships with the Muslim world are pretty good. The Saudis are pissed off about all the alternative energy stuff, but Gore assured them that we’ll still always need oil – but that they can ease off on the tap a bit and stretch out their supply. They went along with him to be sure he’d continue to protect them from Saddam.
We still have Saddam, by the way. No one much cares. Iran holds him in check and he holds them in check. It’s pretty lousy for the Iraqis, but as they’ve come to understand things could have been a lot worse. They didn’t believe what happened here, by the way. Finally we had to agree to let Tariq Ali visit your universe to be convinced that what I reported was true. He came back very shaken. A lot of people here are shaken by what has happened in your timeline. We’ve spread the word to other timelines too, and people in many universes are much more contemplative these days. So you should feel good about that.
So the Middle East has not been a powderkeg – relatively speaking, at least. Gore was a great friend to Israel, but eventually even he got sick of Lieberman’s antics. Let’s just say that even before we discovered your timeline, there were negotiations, and there is hope. One conservative Israeli did raise in the Knesset whether Israel could get the U.S. to take out Saddam, like it did in the HotMerica timeline – and he was forced to resign. That tells you something, doesn’t it?
Gore was not as liberal in our universe as he became in yours, but he was a decent guy and kept things going well. The progress on the environment was substantial during his term. He more or less followed his platform, once Democrats took back Congress in 2002. The advances in medicine, thanks to the focus on stem cells – I guess that’s the first major policy divergence everyone remembers – since 2001 have been profound. The health care reform that he pushed through in 2005 was solid – less ambitious in its timeline than people here wanted, but compared to other timelines we’re pretty happy.
We went into a deficit to cover its implementation, too. $500 billion, which was a shock after several years of surpluses. The Republicans were screaming like you wouldn’t believe. “How can we get the money for this sort of thing!” Just what you’d expect. After we got the news from your universe about the tax cuts and the wars – well, it’s a wonder that we still have a Republican Party left. Feingold got only token opposition in 2008 – meaning that, yes, they finally ran Gingrich, and yes, he got slaughtered.
After his six years as Gore’s second AG, Feingold was pretty much the consensus Democratic nominee for President. (Evan Bayh did run against him for the nomination. That was a hoot. Even his father ended up endorsing Feingold.) We "Jeromiacs" mostly think of Feingold as too conservative, because he still has that fiscal discipline fetish – and people need help! But we have to admit that he navigates the shoals pretty well. The union movement is growing again, after we passed card check, and VP Sebelius – oh, yeah, we have a woman Veep – has been an absolute tiger at promoting efficiency in providing social services. (That reminds me. Congratulations on electing a Black man as President. You may be used to it by now, but it still gives us a thrill.)
By the way, can you imagine 20 uninterrupted years of Democratic Presidency? Yes, you can -- FDR and Truman -- but unlike 1952 Feingold looks like a shoo-in for re-election. It's amazing what demoralizing the opposition can do. But then I guess you know that better than I do.
It’s not like we don’t have problems – but many of them are ones that Gore and now Feingold have sought out rather than had dumped in their laps. One of the big issues here is how we dispose of trash and such. It’s divisive, even though it’s not even on your agenda. We’re concerned about population growth, but we have put common sense plans into place and are focusing on women’s education in underdeveloped countries, just like the experts suggest. This creates concerns about cultural imperialism, etc., but without the war in Iraq the temperature of the debates is much lower. We’ve had corruption scandals with our infrastructure projects and all, but Feingold’s reign of terror against corruption when he was AG has helped set the tone that we don’t play that game anymore.
Our states and counties are not going broke. Our economists do attribute it to your tax cuts, by the way. They’re surprised that you even debate this. Some of them are trying to mind-meld with their counterparts in your universe, but that hasn’t worked yet. In fact, the first ever inter-universal communication, as opposed to going and watching and learning, is the one you’re reading.
I suppose you should feel honored, but then again maybe not. We chose you because you needed to hear from us. We wanted to tell you that we care.
My taking over HotMerica Seneca’s body like this – and now he’s snoring loudly with his eyes open as I make him type, which is really gross – has been the topic of great interest here. I know it doesn’t mean much to you – you’ll probably think it’s faked – but to us it’s like a moonshot. There were contests in the newspaper-websites here about what message I should convey, what question I should ask.
The winner was “How could you let this happen?”, but I’m not going to ask. I think we all know how this happened. History is contingent – there are universes out there, no doubt, where humanity never evolved or no longer exists – and it turns out that small things, like a decision to block purging of voter rolls or a decision to let the person with fewer votes in the decisive state become President – have huge consequences. This isn’t your fault, especially you reading your version of Daily Jerome, but it is your problem. As Ambassador Jesse Jackson used to say, “you’re not responsible for being down, but you are responsible for getting up.”
I wanted to tell you that we are watching you and that we care. You can interpret “being watched” religiously if you wish, as if it’s a message from heaven rather than from 3.0492-omicron to 3.2597-omicron (those are our “official” designations), but it’s not usually that intrusive. We care about what happens to you. We know that your times are hard, and we know that this response is feeble, but we care. We can’t help it. We’re only human. You make us sad and we want to reach out to you.
We can't help you directly; it’s not like we can invade or anything. All we can tell you is that there is another path that you could have taken and that you should try to find your way back to that path. Ten years ago, you took a blow to the gut larger than anyone would have imagined, but you’ve worked your way out of it to some extent and now you have to keep at it. Please keep our timeline in mind, be guided by the what-might-have-beens that, for us, are what is. You are us, and I don't mean in the Christine O'Donnell sense. The clerics here, in coming to grips with the multiverse, suggest that we are joined at the souls. We wish you the best because you are us, and while we have had a better roll of the dice you have also accomplished some great things. We hope that you will work hard to gain what you lost, what we retained. You'll have to cooperate with each other to do so.
Happy holidays. I’m going to find Senaca a towel – he’s started drooling as well as snoring – and send him back to bed. In the late morning he’ll sign on and I left a hypnotic suggestion that he hit “publish.” What happens after that, as always – writ great and small – is up to you.