It’s very possible that had Teresa LaPore designed the Palm Beach County ballot differently, so as to make it clearer which line was for Gore and which was for Buchanan, that right now Joe Lieberman would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and that many of the people currently inclined to blog furious denunciations of Lieberman would be praising him.
Of course it’s also likely that a lot of the people involved in politics today, especially those of us who are progressive and on the younger side, wouldn’t be nearly as engaged as we are now if it hadn’t been for the 2000 farce, 9/11, Iraq, etc.
And of course there’s also a universe in which John McCain accepted John Kerry’s offer of the VP slot, and the two of them ran and won a bipartisan ticket committed to ending the incompetence of the Bush administration and prosecuting the war in Iraq the right way. That world would likely have involved a “troop surge” and reliance on the sort of counterinsurgency theories associated with David Petraeus (who, at the time, was a favorite of Bush-critical journalists).
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