This win, [2000 Presidential Election] unlike any other, showed Republicans that the people in control of the levers and political machinery could give an aura of legality to wanton purges, bureaucratic runarounds and other chicanery.
Carol Anderson - The Republican Approach to Voter Fraud: Lie (OpEd - NYT)
We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?
Donald Trump - December 2020, telling aides he will not surrender the White House
A bathtub filled nearly to the brim holds an impressive amount of water. If someone suggested to you that removing 3 teaspoons would make a significant and visible change, you might be inclined to wonder if he held any other bizarre views.
After all was said and done, Al Gore won the state of Florida in 2000 by 537 votes. Compared to the number of voters, his margin was as slender as taking out those 3 teaspoons of water from bathtub. Yet, under winner take all rules, after thousands of man-hours of exhaustive recounts, endless deliberation about “hanging chads”, and furious arguments about who voters were really intending to select on their ballots, it was concluded that Gore won.
The margin was “officially” determined to be 537. It could have been 117, 538 or 1003. There are those to this day who were involved in the process and will swear that Katherine Harris, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State, had thousands of Democratic votes thrown out, making the margin far closer than it had any right to be. But nobody with any legitimate evidence opposes the conclusion that Al Gore won the 2000 election to be President of the United States by the metaphorical 3 teaspoons of water in a filled bathtub.
And yet, George Bush became President and the course of history was forever changed.
Not for the better, it is safe to assume.
In a country, desperately in need of radically imaginative and positive leadership at the beginning of a new millennium, Bush, no doubt inspired by louder voices at every turn:
Bizarrely failed to intercept the attack on America on 9/11.
Took America into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the latter for reasons that can only charitably be described as “unfounded”.
Failed to capture the leader of Al-Qaeda, saying at one notable press conference, “And again, I don’t know where he is. I - I’ll repeat what I said - I’m truly not that concerned about him”.
Failed to respond with any significant understanding of the gravity of Hurricane Katrina, one of the moments in recent American history when the desperately bad condition of America’s dark underbelly was revealed with stark clarity.
It is a sad commentary that he is remembered more for his cheery comment, “Way to go, Brownie” (directed at Michael D. Brown, the head of FEMA, an agency that totally floundered in its response to the hurricane).Failed to anticipate the unimaginable scope of the 2007-08 banking debacle, and then betrayed all conservative principles by bailing out banks whose blind greed sent the country to the edge of a financial depression which could have been worse than that of 1929-39.
In January of 2009, when asked to look back on his Presidency prior to leaving it, Bush admitted, in what must be one of the great understatements of all time, “Things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way”.