The Gore Presidency: An Alternative History

The final agreement of the parties was to adhere to the same schedule as the United States and Russia for the elimination of their nuclear weapon stockpiles and for UN inspections.

Iraq’s agreement was a surprising development and represented another victory for Gore’s carrot and stick approach. Acting on inside information from Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Jaji Sabri, and Tahir Jali Hubbush al-Tikriti, the head of Saddam’s intelligence service (both of whom had become agents of the West), Gore authorized his ambassador to the United Nations, former president Jimmy Carter, to secure the removal of all economic sanctions against Iraq (and its people).

Gore then secretly informed Saddam that his resignation and exile would be the price for him to keep his foreign bank accounts containing funds he had diverted from the "oil for food" program. Otherwise, the funds would be judicially frozen by litigation resulting from his invasion of Kuwait.

After Saddam left on an "extended vacation" in Egypt, the Iraqi people elected a government more reflective of its Shiite and Kurdish populations. UN inspections continued to find that Iraq had abandoned all of its weapons of mass destruction programs.

Quickly rebounding from the mild recession of 2002, America’s business profits, job creation and the incomes of its workers began to steadily increase.

With a solid majority of progressive Democrats in Congress and a disorganized Republican opposition, President Gore convinced business and industrial leaders that national health care would be in their best interests.

His proposal went beyond the single-payer insurance concept, and Congress established the National Health Service to administer a program to provide medical care to all Americans, except those who opt out of the System in exchange for a tax deduction and private coverage.

Workers benefited from elimination of their Medicare payroll tax deductions, and once freed from the cost of providing medical insurance and most workers’ compensation insurance coverage, American businesses quickly gained equal footing with their competitors in other countries.

Exports soared and the balance of payments began to weigh on America’s side of the scale.

The demoralized Republican Party nominated Senator John McCain as its candidate for the 2004 presidential election. McCain, who had lost the primary battle in 2000 to Texas Governor George W. Bush due to the nasty campaign conducted by Karl Rove, Bush’s political advisor, hired Rove to manage his 2004 campaign.

Rove’s attempts to go negative ricocheted when several investigative journalists independently reported McCain’s active complicity in concealing the fate of more than 600 American POWs who were left alive in Vietnam at the end of the war. McCain’s campaign imploded and he backed out of his agreement to debate President Gore.

President Gore refused to comment on McCain’s erratic behavior, and he conducted an entirely positive campaign based on his record and his plans for the future. The American public responded enthusiastically and handed McCain the greatest electoral defeat in the nation’s history, even worse than that suffered by George McGovern in 1972. McCain carried only one state, Arizona, for a total of six electoral votes.

The voters also handed President Gore a filibuster-proof majority of progressives in both houses of Congress

President Gore had obtained Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol during his first term, and he had been able to get legislation through Congress that substantially increased the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards and eliminated the "light truck" exemption that was allowing domestic manufacturers to turn out fuel-guzzling "sport utility vehicles."

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