It's the morning after Election Day, and while he's won comfortably in the popular vote, Al Gore has just barely squeaked through with a victory in the electoral college. Immediately the Republicans press for recounts in Florida... and Iowa, and Oregon, and Wisconsin. Endless recounts are authorized 5-4 by the Supreme Court, and seemingly endless they are, as the GOP tries to find a formula that will tilt these states to Bush. ("We'll count the military absentee ballots, but not the regular ballots where the chads weren't entirely removed...") Indeed, they continue even after President Gore is sworn in. (Compare Bob Dornan's attempt to wrest his congressional seat back from Loretta Sanchez for nearly a year after the election.) After it becomes clear that the recount numbers will always favor Gore, the Bushies switch tactics and argue that Gore's victory was due to fraud. Who knows what dirty tricks went down in those ethnic precincts? The Democrats stole the election!

The controversy wouldn't die down the way it did in our 2000, either; while we have only the occasional reminder from Michael Moore that Bush is a "fictitious president," in this alternate happentrack you can rest assured that Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and company would be hammering this theme home every day without fail. 62,400 repetitions equal one truth. This is one of the key asymmetries in America today: while rich Democrats kick around the idea of giving Al Franken a radio show as the solution to the left's inability to spread their memes, the far right trots out demagogue after demagogue and tens of millions hang on their every word.

Between the "Gore stole the election" mantra and the sputtering economy (for nothing could really have prevented a recession after the tech bubble popped) — not to mention a Congress with both houses in the opposition, for Jim Jeffords doesn't flip without being jerked around by the Bush Administration — the Gore presidency would have been crippled from the get-go. Of course, Bush wasn't doing much better for most of 2001. Then came September 11th. Does the nation rally around President Gore? I doubt it. This is another asymmetry, you see: the Republicans are perceived as the more patriotic of America's two major parties, and there seems to be little that can tarnish this notion. Superpatriots like Trent Lott, Don Nickles and Tom DeLay spent much of the Clinton Administration making remarks that they call treasonous when Tom Daschle levels them at Bush. Would they have stood behind President Gore when the World Trade Center collapsed? Hardly. "THE DEMOCRATS HAVE BEEN WEAKENING THIS COUNTRY FOR YEARS AND NOW LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED!" they'd have screamed. "THIS WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE PRESIDENT!"

And Gore would be in a no-win situation. For here we reach asymmetry number three. No one worried that a Republican president's response to a major terrorist attack on the US would be too dovish. In mid-September of 2001, people had two fears about George W. Bush: that he'd nuke pretty much the entirety of the Middle East, or that he'd freeze up like Cindy Brady on a game show. When he put off invading Afghanistan for a full month, and didn't dump the presidency on Cheney and run screaming back to Texas, people suddenly viewed him as a statesman. Gore, on the other hand, would have the opposite problem. He wouldn't have people urging him not to do anything rash; he'd have people screaming, "DO SOMETHING!" But no matter what he did (short of, say, nuking pretty much the entirety of the Middle East) he'd face withering criticism from both sides. Say he did the same thing Bush did: take a month to develop a plan, then begin a bombing campaign in Afghanistan while offering support to the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Those who had held their noses and voted for Gore instead of Nader in this happentrack would break out their "NOT IN OUR NAME" signs, pointing out that if they'd wanted a president who was going to kill civilians (more Afghan civilians were killed by US bombs than the total death toll at the World Trade Center) and cozy up to tyrants such as Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov (who's been known to kill his opponents by boiling them to death), they might as well have thrown the election to Bush. Meanwhile, critics on the right would insist that Gore wasn't doing nearly enough. "If George W. Bush were president al-Qaeda would be finished by now!" they'd proclaim before the month was out. "No more Clintonian half-measures! Impeach Gore! Our freedom is at stake!"

Now, true, there's a list of Bush travesties that we wouldn't see under a Gore Administration: a ridiculous tax cut for the ultra-rich, a manufactured war on Iraq, an alarming erosion of our civil rights, and let's not forget the scorn of the world. But it wouldn't matter. Less than a year into his administration, Gore would be Jimmy Carter redux. While in the real 2002, the Democrats, cowed by the fear of seeming unpatriotic, unveiled a campaign pitch that went "the president is peachy keen except we would also like a prescription drug benefit," the Republicans in this alternate 2002 would run on a platform of "the Democrats stole the election, led us into recession and got half the east coast bombed." They would clean up in the midterm elections. The next day the Bush 2004 campaign would launch. And when Bush took office in January 2005, his party would have, what, maybe seventy senators to its credit? Not to mention a team ready to invade Iraq by mid-March.

See, a lot of people on the left seem to be under the impression that Bush is an aberration, that if only we'd managed to fend him off in 2000 it'd be smooth sailing for years to come. That it was somehow a colossal mistake of some sort that America elected a self-satisfied, none-too-bright religious zealot as its leader. But Bush is not the problem. America is the problem. This is a country populated by, if not a majority, then at least a significant plurality of self-satisfied, none-too-bright religious zealots. This is a country where the fundamentalist Left Behind series is a runaway bestseller; where more than half the population thinks the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis; where you can't turn on the radio or television without hearing a wave of racist invective and it's considered just fine because the targets are the French. Note that I'm not arguing that this makes the US any different from the rest of the world — I'm well aware that the French don't seem especially concerned by the attacks on French Jews by North African emigres. The point is, there is an endless supply of George W. Bushes in this country and the American public is more than happy to elect them to high office. Have we forgotten Dan Quayle? Have we forgotten Ronald Reagan? Have we forgotten Warren G. Har— okay, I can understand forgetting Warren G. Harding. What it comes down to is this: if Bush were the extremist interloper some would make of him, a sort of American version of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the problem would take care of itself, as Bush would have no chance at all in 2004. (Compare northern New Mexico, where the liberal 57% lost to the conservative 43% for a House seat in 1997 by splitting 40-17 Democrat-Green. That state of affairs lasted until 1998.) If, on the other hand, Bush is fairly representative of America as a whole, then a Gore win in 2000 would have just been postponing the inevitable. I suspect the latter is the case. After all, if Nader voters are responsible for the Democrats' woes, then how'd the Democrats manage to lose seats in the Nader-free 2002 midterms? I get the sense that a lot of the grumblers are angry because deep down they feel the Nader voters deprived them of four final years before the Republicans took over forever.

And again, it's not as if we'd be living in some sort of utopia under President Gore. Few voters who found Gore even tolerable voted for Nader. For me, for instance, the deal was sealed when Gore picked his running mate; it's said that a challenger's VP choice is the electorate's first look at the sort of decisions we can expect in the future, and Gore decided on the sanctimonious, notoriously censorious corporate shill Joe Lieberman. But you can't vote based on who you actually want to be president! the Gore voters insisted. Don't be so naive! You have to vote tactically! Fine. But why restrict those tactics to the short term? Would you rather have four years of Gore and Lieberman followed by Dubya, a filibuster-proof GOP Capitol, and the possible demise of the Democratic Party? Or four years of Bush and a shot at someone better than Gore in 2004? Of course, it remains to be seen who the Democrats might pick. It could be John Edwards. So help us, it might be fricking Lieberman. Don't even start! the Gore voters bark. This time, you damn well are voting for the lesser of two evils! Bush is a plutocratic warmonger who thinks he's on a mission from God! The problem is, in America, that might well be a winning campaign slogan — for Bush.

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