this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Al Gore is the perfect example of why we can't ig ore the importance of charisma in a candidate.
Dude would have been a great president, and having him at the helm instead of Bush would have drastically change global politics to this very day.
But he was a wet blanket, didn't have the balls to challenge it, and too progressive for the DNC to defend.
People keep ignoring that presidential elections are basically just statewide popularity contests. At the end of the day nothing matters but the voters opinions.
People keep saying that and they keep being wrong.
There was no daylight between Bush and Gore on foreign policy, and very little daylight between Bush and Gore on domestic policy.
A hypothetical Gore administration would have invaded Afghanistan. It would have invaded Iraq. It would have implemented the Patriot Act and instituted the policy of destabilizing Muslim countries to honeypot terrorist groups into civil war (the so-called "Bush Doctrine"), all the vicious realpolitik warmongering that Kissenger taught Clinton and Bush and Obama to do so well.
Understand: we have lived under the Kissinger Administration from 1972 to the present day. Anybody who thinks a different President would have made a difference in global politics is fooling themselves.
Just to pick out one thing, Iraq was very deliberately setup by the Bush Administration. They put specific effort into falsifying evidence to support an invasion. There's no particular reason to believe Iraq would have been invaded by Gore.
A major issue in the run up to 9/11 was a coordination failure due to a delayed Administration transition. It's hard to say for sure, but it's quite possible 9/11 doesn't even happen if it's a direct transition between Clinton and Gore.
Oh, and we'd probably be in the ICC. The treaty was finalized towards the end of Clinton's run, he was in favor of it, but he left it to the next Admin to decide what to do with it. Bush Admin canned it.