[Economist] If Al Gore had won...

[Gordon Mohr]

Chilling depiction of how things would be different if Al Gore had 
won the presidency last year...

  http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=863662

# Lexington
# 
# Al Gore discovers himself
# 
# Nov 15th 2001
# From The Economist print edition
# 
# 
# What would it have been like if Al Gore had won last year's
# election?
# 
# THIS has been a truly remarkable week for President Al Gore. The
# Taliban is in full retreat in Afghanistan. Vladimir Putin has
# agreed to scrap more than two-thirds of Russia's nuclear weapons,
# fulfilling a dream that Mr Gore has cherished since he first went
# into politics. And Congress stands poised to pass a giant stimulus
# package. No wonder the president's approval rate stands at a
# stratospheric 87%.
# 
# It seems almost churlish at such a time to bring up the little
# matter of the 2000 vote. But after last November's disputed
# election a consortium of conservative newspapers, led by the
# Washington Times, decided to pay for a recount of all the Florida
# votes. A million dollars of Richard Mellon Scaife's money and
# thousands of man-hours later, these Republican geniuses have
# proved what we all knew already: that the election was damn close.
# If Mr Gore had followed the advice of some of his more cynical
# advisers and concentrated on counting the votes in just four
# Democrat- controlled counties, rather than doing the honest thing
# and calling for a recount of all the votes in the state, he would
# have lost to George Bush.
# 
# Can you imagine it? Mr Bush has gone into semi-retirement in
# Austin, his limited abilities as Texas's governor taxed by a
# legislature that meets only every other year. But the mere thought
# that he might have been president sends shivers down the spine.
# This is a man whose idea of foreign travel was to visit a barrio
# or two when he wished to appear "compassionate", and who would
# have conducted foreign policy from behind a Maginot Line of
# missiles. There is every reason to believe that, after September
# 11th, a President Bush would have struck out blindly at Osama bin
# Laden, perhaps even using nuclear weapons.
# 
# Which all goes to show how sensible the American people were to
# choose a man with real experience. Mr Gore has brought a
# remarkable set of skills to the present crisis, honed by a
# lifetime in politics and eight years in the vice-presidency. His
# "golden Rolodex", as one commentator has called it, has been
# invaluable to his building of a grand alliance against terror. He
# used his close personal relationship with Mr Putin to bring a
# reluctant Russia into the war, fundamentally changing the whole
# pattern of geopolitics. He used his ideological ties to Tony
# Blair, forged at many a seminar on the Third Way, to turn Britain
# into a bedrock of support. It is fair to say that Mr Gore has not
# one secretary of state but two: the indomitable Richard Holbrooke
# and the ever-loyal British prime minister.
# 
# The mention of Mr Holbrooke points to another extraordinary fact
# about the Gore presidency: the quality of the people he can call
# on. It is no exaggeration to say that Mr Gore has the entire
# brainpower of the country, from Washington think-tanks to the Ivy
# League universities, at his disposal. And there are few brains as
# acute as the secretary of state's.
# 
# Mr Holbrooke is one of the most experienced diplomats in the
# business. Mr Gore credits him with getting Germany wholeheartedly
# to join the anti- terrorist campaign, thanks to his time as
# ambassador there. But in some ways Mr Holbrooke still has to come
# into his own. The very qualities that make the secretary of state
# so unpopular in polite circles-his abrasive self-importance, his
# absolute confidence that he is right on matters big and small-make
# him a giant when it comes to negotiating with primitive warlords.
# He knocked heads together with extraordinary success in Bosnia; he
# will do the same thing in Afghanistan.
# 
# Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle
# 
# Mr Gore's extraordinary knowledge of Washington has been more of a
# mixed blessing in two other areas. The first is military strategy.
# The president has been a military buff ever since he became a
# congressman back in 1977. But his encyclopedic knowledge of
# warfare-and his iron belief in his own abilities-have inevitably
# led to clashes with the Pentagon. The generals grumble that Mr
# Gore wanted to control where every bomb was dropped, and that the
# result was a much more hesitant start than necessary to the war.
# 
# On the home front, Mr Gore was furious at the way the anthrax
# outbreak threw his administration into confusion. He could not
# understand why the Centres for Disease Control did not know more
# about the illness. He was apoplectic when he discovered that the
# FBI did not even know which laboratories in the country were
# licensed to produce the stuff. Yet his decision to put himself in
# charge of a special task-force has failed to produce results. Even
# more unsatisfactory has been his handling of the question of
# airport security. His remarks that those Republicans who oppose
# federalising security workers are "Neanderthals with the blood of
# the American people on their hands" is hardly likely to produce
# compromise.
# 
# Mr Gore's habit of micromanaging events is clearly his biggest
# weakness: a weakness that has been made worse by the decision to
# put Vice-President Joseph Lieberman (who had aroused much wrath on
# the Arab street because of his Jewish background) into a permanent
# secret location. But all this pales into insignificance beside Mr
# Gore's secret weapon during these dark days: his discovery of his
# true self.
# 
# The strongest criticism of Mr Gore has always been that he does
# not know who he is. Throughout his career, he reinvented himself
# to suit the mood of the times. In his first run for the
# presidency, he presented himself as a champion of the business-
# minded New Democrats; in his second run, he campaigned for the
# people against the powerful. All this left the impression that he
# had no hard centre, but was simply playing at politics in order to
# appease his father's ghost.
# 
# All this changed on September 11th. The collapse of the twin
# towers gave this extraordinarily restless and energetic man the
# task he has been seeking all his life: the war against terrorism.
# Al Gore at last knows what God put him on earth to achieve.
#