>Were it not for the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach County and the
>Democratic Party's failure to insist on a statewide recount of the
>Florida vote, the crisis that has engulfed America since September
>11 would be unfolding in a vastly different political landscape.
>Both houses of Congress would still be controlled by Republicans.
>Attorney General John Ashcroft would likely be in retirement. Tom
>Ridge, head of the new Office of Homeland Security, and Tommy
>Thompson, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human
>Services, would be, respectively, the governors of Pennsylvania and
>Wisconsin. And, of course, the U.S. commander in chief would hail
>not from Texas but from Tennessee.
>
>For the narrow majority of voters in the 2000 election who selected
>Al Gore to be their president, everything about such a scenario
>would seem to be welcome. The nation's fate would, after all, be in
>the hands of an experienced Democrat with ample knowledge of foreign
>affairs. Gore's inner circle would undoubtedly have included more
>liberal internationalists and fewer right-wing unilateralists
>preoccupied with missile defense. The war on terrorism, it follows,
>would have been conducted with greater sensitivity to classic
>liberal concerns, such as safeguarding civil liberties at home as
>well as ensuring that military force abroad is used judiciously and
>within reasonable legal and moral constraints.
>
>The only problem with such a scenario is that it doesn't hold up
>under scrutiny. Although we cannot know for certain how a Gore
>administration would have responded to the terrorist attacks, the
>election campaign of the former vice president and his running mate,
>Joseph Lieberman--along with the intense pressure they would have
>felt from the right--suggests that, if anything, Gore and company
>would have shown less caution and restraint than the Bush
>administration has in deploying military force. On some war-related
>issues, such as civil liberties, the differences between Al Gore and
>George W. Bush would likely have been marginal.
rest at: <http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/22/press-e.html>