Without our 18th century electoral college system, there would have been no crisis in 2000. Al Gore clearly won the election, though not by any great amount. But in America, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who gets the electors from each state, usually allocated on a winner-take-all basis.
Exit polls showed, and news agencies judged, that Gore had carried Florida. Then the actual vote counts ran against the polls – an extremely unusual event. It was then observed that many ballots there had been printed and arranged (perhaps unintentionally) so that they were likely to drive intended Gore votes to either Bush or Pat Buchanan.
Bush now showed a very narrow victory in Florida, and a one-vote majority among electors. Gore and the Democrats demanded a recount, which lower courts granted. As the constitutional date for the electoral college vote roared closer, Bush got a Supreme Court hearing.
Court employees handed copies of the bitter 5-4 decision to reporters even as the justices fled out the back under cover of darkness. They deliberately omitted the customary summary, so reporters read the decision out loud on air until they could figure out what it said. The justices were long gone before reporters informed the world that five members of the Court had effectively made Bush president because (by the count that they in practice accepted) he had carried Florida by 547 votes out of almost six million. Gore had actually won the national election by more than half a million votes, out of 101,000,000+. Many of the new Bush team came in like conquerors, crowing that God had put them in the White House, which only drove Bush’s already-low opinion poll ratings even lower. As did their gleeful efforts to ram his programs and appointments down the throats of a country which had just rejected both.
But Bush won praise for his work to rally the nation and the world after the horrendous September 11 terrorist attacks… then quickly squandered that unity.
America, “the world’s only superpower,” had led the west to peaceful victory in the Cold War, and to the end of the Soviet Union and European Communism. Now we were united in the face of terrible tragedy. The world responded with an outpouring of support, and even love, and rallied to join the U.S. in a campaign against the terrorists.
Unfortunately the often-passive Bush relied heavily on his advisors (mostly brought in from his father’s team), and THEY had learned all the wrong lessons – lessons, if fact, that the elder Bush had publicly warned about.
During the Clinton years, some Bush men had urged that the United States, as the world’s only superpower, should just go ahead and do whatever it wanted to, and ignore the other nations. Rather than consulting, negotiating, or leading, we should just ACT, and the rest of the world would soon learn that it had to comply.
So we quickly jettisoned international support, simply announcing without consultation what we were going to do, and what we expected the other nations to do. When they raised objections or even questions, or even just asked for more information, Bush announced “If you aren’t for us, you’re for the terrorists,” and told domestic critics the same.
They also revived their campaign, vetoed by the first President Bush, to conquer all of Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein, falsely charging that Iraq had been behind September 11, or at least had helped. This has been discredited, and was ridiculous on its face, since Saddam and Osama had despised each other for years.
By 2002 we were in two wars – fighting Al Qaeda and the government in Afghanistan, and fighting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The war rationale kept shifting in Iraq, just as it had in Vietnam. Saddam (who was, in fact, a brutal dictator and a sometime sponsor of terrorism) was found, captured, tried, and executed. But rather than universal Iraqi applause, this went almost unnoticed in a decade-long insurgency against U.S. occupation. People began to recognize that just as we had not had an adequate rationale, we also had no exit strategy.
All this hurt Bush, who’d been riding high since September 11 and a quick initial victory in Iraq. He was hurt again by photos and film of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in an official U.S. program. Even so, Bush won the 2004 election – the only “Reject President” to go on and win a second term.
But Iraq kept getting worse, and victory still eluded us in Afghanistan. Many military personnel left the sefvice as soon as possible. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and killed 1500 people – many dieing of thirst while waiting at designated spots for rescues that never came – the disbelieving nation recognized that despite promoting themselves as the “national security” administration, in four years since September 11 they had not made adequate plans or preparations to evacuate a major city.
Bush was term-limited out in 2008, and the public was increasingly unhappy with him, and with his party in general. Republicans, ever against government regulation, had repealed many New Deal restrictions on Wall Street, set in place during the Great Depression. The unsurprising result was a Depression-style crash, right in the midst of the election campaign, and Obama won. Numerous scholars seriously labeled Bush as the worst president in American history. He would not have to bear that burden long.