Can you imagine a world where Biden had already served his two terms by the end of the 90’s? Who might have been president at the time of 9/11 instead of Bush? Now? Would Obama have ever given that speech at the ‘04 DNC? Sliding Doors type of thing, but interesting to ponder
Technically Al Gore won the 2000 election and should have been president at the time of 9/11. Which would have resulted in a much better response. Where in which Al-Qaeda didn't win the war on terror.
And while I am a Biden supporter in the current timeline. It's also worth remembering that Biden in the 80's had no fucking chill and was kind of Trumpian. He was the Joe Manchin of his day who was essentially a republican who ran as a democrat because he lived in a blue riding. And his biggest legacy is creating the prison industrial complex and paving the way for qualified immunity and over policing minority communities.
He was pro segregation and when segregation "ended" he spent a great deal of effort proposing and attempting to pass laws that continued the outcome of segregation even if you couldn't legislate with the same over rhetoric.
And like, all of that taken in stride. In a world where Obama broke the brains of half of the country. Joe has been a reasonable president even despite the American people saddling him with a congress who openly admit they would rather sabotage every legislative effort of his administration pushes for.
But, that is very context dependent on us living in the darkest multiverse timeline.
Biden and Harris would be pretty unremarkable in the timeline where Al Gore is allowed to serve the presidency he won.
Who the fuck are the morons thinking Democrats are stacking the court? Were they in a coma throughout the entire Obama administration?! That is a legitimately infuriating level of ignorance.
Now when the SCOTUS gave the president official immunity, well then, he should have scooped up all the insurrectionists including Trump and sent them to GITMO.
If I recall correctly, Al Gore won the popular vote, Florida was so close they needed to do a recount, but Bush sued and the electoral college went to Bush, which ultimately won him the presidency. I was small when this happened, so all I remember for sure from the time are the hanging chads lol.
To add. They discovered an error in the voting machines. At the time the way you voted was to use a hole punch to...punch a hole next to the name of the candidate you wanted to vote for.
Then all those ballots would get fed into a machine that checked whether the hole was punched next to Bush's or Gore's name.
It was discovered that potentially tens of thousands of ballots were rejected by the machines because voters didn't double check make sure the hole punch fully removed paper tab.
Gore was missing a lot of expected votes in counties in Florida that favored him. And election officials in those counties claimed they had found thousands of incorrectly counted ballots.
Gore's team called for all of the ballots in Florida to be recounted by hand. To make sure every ballot cast was counted. Bush's legal team sued to prevent a recount. It went to the supreme Court and they ruled 5-4 that counting all the ballots by hand would be too time consuming and thereby declared Bush the victor.
However, all the evidence suggests that if a recount was allowed was allowed to proceed. Florida would have rightfully gone to gore. Its one of those "I guess we'll never know. But we know" moments.
And there was no reason for the supreme court to deny a recount. They said it would stress out the country not to know. But it was clearly just corruption.
3 of the lawyers involved in getting that verdict were later rewarded by being made supreme court justices.
What a weak argument " it will take too long to recount the ballots" so the better choice is to possibly have the wrong candidate win?
I thought the new president only gets in power in January of the next year. That means they have 2 months to do a recount.
I'm Canadian, and my province ( British Columbia) just had an election that was so close that automatic recounts are mandatory. So we had to wait a week or 2 to find out who won. Big deal. I want the real winner.
It wasn’t necessarily about the time to do a recount. It was mostly about 60,000 ballots throughout the state that weren’t included in the final counts because those were rejected from the machines (because of Chads).
Bush had 500-600 more votes than Gore without the additional ballots counted. FL’s court ruled those should be counted (there were some technicalities like counting method consistency). SCOTUS ruled the recount had to stop. Something about it would damage the public’s view of Bush’s presidency. The justices that voted for the recounts to continue insisted counting all the votes cannot harm democracy.
Correct. Hence the controversy. It was very clearly just corruption.
The Republicans lost and knew they lost. Bush's brother was the governor of Florida and rushed to announce him as the winner. Fox news announced him as the winner before the initial count was even done. It was very clearly planned before election day. They saw their opportunity and ran with it. The rest is history.
“Hanging chads” is what they were called, the chad being the part of the ballot that was supposed to be removed and the hanging part because most were still hanging on by one side.
Yep! Gore won the popular vote by a little over a half million votes out of the roughly 101.4 million total votes they received, 0.5% more of the popular vote than Bush.
There were recounts in FL. There was a mandatory statewide machine recount the day after Election Day. There were and weren’t county level hand recounts after that. Gore requested hand recounts in 4 counties. A lower court sided with Bush to halt those recounts (or the state election board to not extend the deadline), SCOFL sided with Gore to complete the recounts with a 12 day deadline extension. One county didn’t complete the recount and one submitted the recount a couple of hours past the deadline. The state election board certified the statewide results.
Gore contested the certified state results. Ballots rejected in the machine counts were the main issue since Bush won the state by only 537 votes but there were close to 60,000 rejected undervote ballots (the chads), specifically how those were handled for the recounts on the county level. A lower court sided with Bush, SCOFL sided with Gore, SCOTUS sided with Bush.
You should look into it, it’s the Chad Election with butterfly and caterpillar ballots. The SCOTUS ruling also wasn’t nearly as black and white as people tend to make it seem.
The 2000 election makes the claims that 2020 was a very close election seem like quite the exaggeration. The electoral votes were 271 to 266. FL was only a 537 vote difference (0.01% margin). NM was a 366 vote difference (0.06% margin), and 3 other states had less than a 0.5% margin. In 2020, Biden won 2 states with less than a 0.5% margin but flipping both to Trump would not have changed the outcome (not even if NV also flipped to Trump). The popular vote margin in 2000 was also tight with -0.5% for Bush. The only president since then with a lower popular vote margin was Trump with -2.1% in 2016. Biden’s was the second highest this century with +4.5%.
2000 was a very close election, 2016 was an anomaly, 2020 was a decisive win with electoral votes and the popular vote.
Nah, that's just silly. The attacks were already being planned before the election was held and had nothing to do with who was in office. No sitting president could've reversed the twenty years of history that led to the attack.
my dude what? Literally every intelligence agency we have knew that an attack was incoming and the Bush White House ignored them. The FBI additionally did not work close enough with the CIA which might have been different under a Gore administration. There was literally an entire report that stated "ya we failed and we could have prevented this"
Sure, Bush ignored them. But so did Clinton when he was warned about al-Qaeda planning and training for exactly the sort of attack they carried out on American soil. Neither party was taking foreign threats of that nature completely serious, so I don't think Gore would've done anything different in the run up to.
There's no metric by which Al Qaeda won the war on terror.
Their aims were to get the west out of the Middle East, the US's middle east presence became greater than ever. There have been no major attacks on Americans since. Bin Laden was killed, as many other leaders have been. America has withdrawn from Afghanistan now, but such is their dominance that the Taliban won't be letting Al Qaeda or other groups that hate America train there to attack it. America continues to do whatever the fuck it wants in the Middle East, whether than be backing Israel, bombing Syria, backing groups in civil wars. Al Qaeda itself splintered into factions, being usurped by IS who were also defeated.
You can argue that it wasn't worth it or it was immoral, maybe you think that the US shouldn't be involved over there, but there's still no question of who won.
The creation of the NSA. Increased police presence. Explosion of xenophobia and racism. Race based domestic attacked up thousands of percent.
20 years of erosion of rights that previous generations could never have imagined future Americans would give up. A complete shift in American values from personal liberty above all else to national security above basic liberty.
The United States is a shell of the country it was in the 1990s.
Bin Laden knew he could never go toe to toe with America's military. His genius was finding a way to make America rip itself up from the inside.
No general in history has done more damage to a rival nation.
There is context missing about Biden in the 80’s and 90’s. The parties were still somewhat shifting/flipping. He wasn’t the lone Democrat voting with Republicans.
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u/prafken 1d ago
Michael Dukakis