I recently subscribed to the Times Select feature from the NYT (I recently found out that because I have a college email address, this enables me to get "behind the wall" for free.) Since I got it, I've been obsessively searching for any random article that I can think of. While looking up coverage of the 2000 election, I found an interesting and prophetic column from Frank Rich about what a George W. Bush Presidency would entail:
November 4, 2000
Journal; George W.'s America
By FRANK RICH
It's now official: We have learned far more about George W. Bush and Al Gore than they know about themselves. The press has at last plumbed the shallows of both men, and even the ''November surprise,'' a Fox reporter's revelation of Mr. Bush's police blotter during his blotto years, is not up to Rupert Murdoch's top scandal standards. There may be little choice now but to move on to those nostalgic staples of photo-finish horse races: What if it's a tie? What if the popular-vote victor loses the Electoral College? Most entertaining of all is this year's last-minute human-interest sideshow, ''Dead Man Running'': If Missouri elects a corpse to the Senate, can it still purport to be the ''Show Me'' state?
Since rampant violent crime is now as distant a memory as recession -- the murder rate is at its lowest since 1966, according to the F.B.I. -- we have the additional luxury of debating the aesthetics of bloodshed in Hollywood movies rather than brooding over it in real life. The apocalyptic fears of the cold war -- or any war -- have faded into the memory hole along with the sketchy details of George W.'s Vietnam-dodging sashay through the Texas Air National Guard. Also forgotten, at least by wealthier and younger Nader amnesiacs, is the Reagan-Bush activist record on restricting poor women's access to abortion and empowering anti-abortion zealots; they can't imagine that day returning any more than they can joblessness.
Mr. Bush's opponents brand him as stupid, but there is nothing stupid about the don't-worry-be-happy campaign he unveiled at the convention in Philadelphia. The governor may not know who's in the peacekeeping forces in the Balkans, or whether two men or three, or whatever, have been sentenced to death in the murder of James Byrd. His only plan for some future crisis may be to get Alan Greenspan or Colin Powell on the phone. But he arrives at a time when a satisfied nation isn't all that interested in the fine print. What we don't know hasn't hurt us, either -- at least not within memory.
So THAT'S what happens when voters don't pay attention! 3,000+ civilians dead on 9/11, 3,000 soldiers killed in Iraq, and at least tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed...all because voters forgot to read that ity bitty disclaimer.
In 2000, the fool is the guy who works 24/7 and lets us see all the sweat. That would be Al Gore, who is a hyperventilating fount of worst-case scenarios and details we don't want to bone up on (Dingell-Norwood, anyone?). He is the truly stupid one, for he has given George W. the opening to embody the contented America that his own administration helped to create, even as he has failed to weave all his endless policy details into an articulate message that might offer more than populist sloganeering as an alternative to don't-worry-be-happy. The vice president hasn't even been able to make his criticism of his opponent coherent. ''I have actually not questioned Governor Bush's experience,'' he lied to Jim Lehrer in his very first answer in the first debate -- even though he had questioned it in the past (and rightly so).
Yes, and YOU and other pundits enabled Bush to come to power by setting the narrative against Gore. Granted he made some fuck ups, but without the mainstream media harassing him, the election would not have been close enough for Florida to turn out like it did.
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F30716FD3C5D0C778CDDA80994D8404482
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