What if Al Gore had become president?

With Donald Trump refusing to leave office after four years of pathological behaviour, it’s easy to forget the intensity with which the Bush administration was loathed, writes Andrew Naughtie

Al Gore and George W Bush, December 2000 (REUTERS)

Most presidential candidates aren’t forced to publicly conduct the formal certification of their own defeat. But so it went for Al Gore.

Presiding over a sometimes raucous joint session of Congress in January 2001, he kept his cool as he read out the Electoral College results – 266 for him, 271 for George W Bush. “May God bless our new president,” he said, “and our new vice president, and may God bless the United States of America.”

Mr Gore did not outwardly display any scars from the ordeal he, his party and indeed his country had been through over the previous two months. Nor did he show any rancour at declaring Mr Bush the president-elect despite having defeated him in the popular vote by 500,000.

Instead, he hewed to the words of his own concession speech on 13 December. ”Partisan rancor must now be put aside,” he said. “I accept the finality of the outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

As interminable and cacophonous as the Florida recount had been, the transition after Mr Gore conceded was peaceful and smooth (outside the White House, at least).

But what if the Supreme Court had not halted the count? What if three electors had – against all precedent – switched their votes to throw the Electoral College? What if Al Gore had won?

As vice president and then as a candidate, Mr Gore had been caricatured as wooden and joyless. A 1994 Simpsons episode depicted him as the author of books titled “Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow” and “Rational Thinking, Reasonable Future”; on Saturday Night Live, he was mocked as unsettlingly robotic. A joke went around that he was so boring, his Secret Service codename was “Al Gore” (he has quoted this line himself).

He did little to dispel this reputation during the 2000 campaign, where he sometimes seemed overprepared and gauche. He was also slated for supposedly overselling his own importance, repeatedly and misleadingly quoted as claiming to have “invented the internet”.

But that was all trivialised by the electoral meltdown in December 2000 – and by the events of the next eight years.

Eight years of terror

The Bush administration was still young when four planes were hijacked on 11 September 2001, changing the course not just of the presidency but of global history.

Whether the events of that day would have happened under Mr Gore is impossible to know, though questions of how the Bush administration handled intelligence signals during 2001 were at the heart of the 9/11 Commission report. The more important question is what Mr Gore would have done if the same atrocity had been committed on his watch.

Would Mr Gore have prosecuted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? In a speech from September 2002, when the drumbeat for an invasion of Iraq was growing ever louder, he complained that Mr Bush was shifting the US’s focus away from hunting down the masterminds of 9/11 and towards Iraq – in the process “proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to pre-emptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat”.

Neither hawkish nor dovish, the speech saw Mr Gore dive deep into the arguments circulating at the time, probing different post-war scenarios and strategies and warning what might happen to loose stockpiles of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons – ultimately never found – if the country descended into chaos.

But at the core of the speech was a rejection of what was already condensing into the “Bush Doctrine”.

“President Bush,” he declared, “is presenting us with a proposition that contains within itself one of the most fateful decisions in our history: a decision to abandon what we have thought was America's mission in the world – a world in which nations are guided by a common ethic codified in the form of international law – if we want to survive.”

In fact, many of Mr Bush’s most aggressive security and defence policies actually had roots in the Clinton administration. (Extraordinary rendition, for instance, was used many times in the 1990s.) But what Mr Gore was getting at was the stark reality of the Bush years: even in 2002, the administration was redrafting the US’s place in the world in ways that would change its behaviour indefinitely – and with dire consequences for millions of people.

Full speed ahead

Ultimately, one of the best indicators of the Trump administration’s perversity is that the Bush administration now feels relatively normal – something that at the time would have been inconceivable.

Inaugurated under extraordinarily messy circumstances with a minority of the popular vote, Bush began his term under a cloud, but he and his administration were apparently unperturbed by any potential legitimacy problem. Bob Woodward reported in his book Plan of Attack that far from being cowed by the circumstances of his election, the new president was never interested in any “trimming of sails”. As he claims Mr Cheney once put it, the mentality from the start was “full speed ahead”.

For the ensuing eight years, and particularly after the Iraq War began, alarm and disgust at the Bush presidency only grew more and more intense. Many on the left, including those who shared a deep distaste for Bill Clinton’s horse-trading centrism, were describing the administration as among history’s very worst long before it had ended.

This was hardly a matter of sour grapes after Mr Gore’s loss. The embarrassments, outrages and horrors were legion. Even leaving aside the Iraq disaster and the abuses of the wider War on Terror – under which could be filed extraordinary rendition and torture, Abu Ghraib, Blackwater’s Nisour Square massacre, and much else besides – there came the drip-drip-drip erosion of civil liberties, the tax cuts brazenly favouring the wealthiest Americans, and the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina.

Alarm at the state of the Bush-era economy was in the air long before the 2008 financial crash; at the start of 2007, economist Joseph Stiglitz lamented that “There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.”

As for the environment, Mr Gore’s signature cause, one of the Bush administration’s first major international moves was to back out of the Kyoto Agreement, which Mr Gore himself had signed.

The following years saw the administration drag its feet, and in some ways even go backwards, and by its last days, things looked dire. The House of Representatives’ Democratic-led Global Warming Committee gave a grim assessment in 2007: “While the first 100 days of the Bush administration initiated perhaps the worst period of environmental deregulation in American history, the last 100 days of a Bush presidency could be even worse.”

That the damage done by the Bush years all came down to a few thousand votes in Florida only made it more enraging. And yet today, with the US furiously divided on almost every conceivable issue and the integrity of its democracy in serious doubt, the Bush years barely register a blip in the popular imagination.

That isn’t just because the Trump experience has overwhelmed everyone to the point of amnesia. The Iraq War is anything but forgotten, and movies are still being made about the CIA’s use of torture during the War on Terror. Beyond that, the soothing of many Americans’ Bush-related trauma is in large part because many of the lead players in that drama and its sequel, the Obama administration, have themselves made surprisingly dignified efforts to move on.

Explaining that she is inevitably seated next to Mr Bush out of protocol at museum openings, funerals, memorial services and so on, Ms Obama once described him as “my partner in crime at every major thing where all the formers gather” and called him a “wonderful man”.

No-one living under Mr Bush’s administration would have believed that a future Democratic first lady would ever talk about this particular president with such warmth. And for Democrats and left-wingers who spent the 2000s demanding that Mr Bush, Mr Cheney and various other administration figures be impeached and/or tried on any number of charges, “partner in crime” is a jarring phrase to hear Ms Obama use with affection.

You can call me Al

Mr Gore, meanwhile, charted his own course after 2000, abandoning electoral politics and focusing on the causes that animated him in the first place – chief among them the future of the planet.

His acclaimed 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth relaunched his public career as one of the most powerful advocates for urgent global action on climate change. Followed shortly by the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the film helped sweep aside whatever was left of his human-plywood reputation.

He also endorsed Mr Obama in 2008, albeit at a tactful distance from that year’s epic Democratic primary. And at a rally in Florida in the last days of the campaign, he narrated a recent encounter with a voter in the state that kept him out of the Oval Office.

“I was sitting in a restaurant, and a woman came walking by in front of my table just staring at me as she came past. I didn't think much about it until the same woman came from the opposite direction, just staring at me. So to be polite, I looked up and said ‘how do you do?’

“And she took two steps forward and she said: ‘You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore.’

“So I said ‘thank you’. And she said, ‘you sound like him, too.’”