Gore Would Have Been a One-Termer [View All]

[liberalpragmatist]

I've thought abt this a lot, and my impression is that Gore would have done some great things, some good things, some only adequate things, and would have on the whole been quite a decent President, but I honestly think he'd right now be on his way out. I liked Gore, and I think history would have judged him kindly, but he'd still not be popular right now.

Gore would have been a minority president and would have had the right-wing roasting him and blocking much of his agenda in Congress. Gore lacked Clinton’s political skills and there may well have been a political stalemate. 9-11 would probably have occurred, and while the country would have unified around Gore for a time, the honeymoon would have ended sooner than with Bush b/c the right-wing would have started berating Gore for his multilateralism in the Afghan endeavor and his nation-building. The economy would still have been only a mixed picture, since it is a natural business cycle. Much of it would certainly have been better, and there wouldn’t be ballooning deficits, but it still wouldn’t have been fantastic. And Gore was a free-trader, so many on the left and many unions would likely have pressured him. Nader would have given him hell over the issue.

In short, Progressives would not have been unified, b/c it has in some respects taken someone as bad as Bush for us to see the united goals of the left. Nader would have run again and would have claimed maybe 5 or even 6% of the vote. I think Frist would have been the nominee in the GE for the GOP, though Jeb Bush is a possibility. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would have been GWB again, but my thinking is that many segments of the party would have been resentful that he lost a race they expected to win, and other segments of the party would have seen it as too dynastic to select Jeb (not all GOP’ers are controlled by the Bush cabal, after all).

So I think the nominee would have been Frist and Gore would have lost the election. The results would have been something like 43% Gore, 50% Frist and 6% Nader, with Frist picking off Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin, Iowa, Florida, and possibly a couple other Blue states.

So we’d have:

President Albert A. Gore, Jr. (D): 2001-2005
President William H. Frist (R): 2005 - ?

Certainly, this is no rosy scenario, but it’s light-years ahead of what we have now.

ON EDIT: I've retyped this to make it more concise. The original text can be found in Reply 10. I also want to address one point: nobody knows what would have happened, which makes other people's scenarios just as valid. Certainly it's possible Gore could have been an incredible President, we'll never know. But based on what's realistic and what one could realistically expect, this scenario is what I think would have happened.