Okay, so some of the DU’ers fantasize about having their “real” President. What would have happened if Gore had been on watch during Bush’s first term?

1. Terrorists still would have brought down the WTC.
2. America still would have toppled the government in Afghanistan. The American public would have sent any President packing if he didn’t have the nerve to retaliate against an attack like 9/11.
3. The economic damage from the attack would still have rippled through our economy--sending up oil prices and pummeling the travel and tourism industries, for instance.
4. The stock market still would have tanked from the deflation of the 90’s bubble. (Hey, as an aside, has anyone been keeping an eye on Google’s total stock valuation in reference to its actual revenue and prospects?)
5. The economy was already heading in the wrong direction before Bush took office; the trend was already set, and Al Gore wouldn’t have been able to stop the slide.
6. North Korea would still be a thorn in the side of the United States.
7. China would still be a puzzle.
8. The Middle East would still be the most pressing issue of the day.
9. Martha Stewart would still have gone to jail.

Admittedly, some of Gore’s reactions would have been wildly different from Bush’s. For example:

1. Gore likes taxes. Where Bush decided on a path of tax reduction to stimulate economic growth, Gore would have been more likely to either leave taxes as they were or to give a much smaller reduction. Bush’s tax cuts have proven to be growth friendly, stimulating more job growth than he is typically credited with. It isn’t unreasonable to expect that the fantasy Gore tax rates would have lead to slower growth and a slightly higher jobless rate.
2. On the other hand, Gore wouldn’t have been able to bull through a Medicare pill bill or the billions in new allocations for aid to Africa. Not that he wouldn’t have tried, mind you; I expect that his preference for nationalized health care would have been a high priority for his fantasy administration. I also expect that it would have failed to pass in an unfriendly House and Senate. Regardless of intent, though, I think it is also fair to expect that the fantasy President Gore would have seen slower spending growth and a smaller budget deficit to go with that slower growth and marginally higher unemployment.
3. Iraq was coming to a point where a decision had to be made: military intervention or lifting sanctions and slowly normalizing relations. Since the sanctions were so porous, the Hussein regime wasn’t going to collapse or change, most world leaders still believed that he illegal weapons programs and the capacity to destabilize the region if not kept under adult supervision. This begs the question: what would Gore have done about Iraq in the shadow of the 9/11 attacks? I’m not sure, but it is hard to imagine that whatever action he took would have led to the Iraq elections that we all got so giddy about.
4. And the show of determination and will has changed American relations with the Middle East. Even though Lebanon would have been under enormous stresses, would Syria have left so quickly if it weren’t for the threat (imagined or real) of decisive American intervention? Would Libya have pushed so hard, even with its financial difficulties, to normalize relationships with the rest of the world? Would even that tiny sliver of hope remain that there can be peace between Israel and the Palestinians? While I don’t credit Bush directly with all of the events, I do credit his leadership for making the possibility for positive, liberal changes in the region something that the citizens of places like Lebanon will strive for.

This is, of course, a tiny overview of the possibilities and none of my guesses and assumptions is absolutely correct. The left fringe seems to imagine that if Gore had been elected, the world would have been some utopia. The fact is, many of the events would have been precisely the same and many of our reactions wouldn’t have been all that different. But it’s the culmination of tiny choices, nudging the direction of world events over decades, that makes the world we actually inhabit. The tiny choices that Gore could have made, while unlikely to have been as disastrous as, for example, Jimmy Carter’s presidency, would still have nudged events away from their current track. There is room to imagine both good and bad in that, but, on the biggest issues of the day, I don’t think he would have done better and it’s a possibility that he would have done much worse.

Of course, your view will probably differ from mine (both on the current President and on the Fantasy President), but there is one thing I am absolutely certain of: this imaginary utopia led by the sainted Al Gore neither exists nor had an opportunity to exist.