So... If the country wasn't looking for leadership, Kerry would have been the man?

Interesting question though: If not for 9/11, who would have been the democrat's nominee?

It could have been Kerry. But it also may have been Gephart. Who knows, maybe Dean would have slipped in without the context of the War on Terror.

I agree, I'm just thinking that you should want someone in the White House that you feel would be able to handle anything. I doubt most people felt that way about GWB prior to 9/11, and most were happy to be proven wrong. I wouldn't have thought it of Clinton in the begining, but I think he would have risen to it.

However, when you are already at war... To say that your candidate would have won if you hadn't been, kind of validates the fact that he lost.

Ahem, well as they say, if my grandmother had had testicles, she'd be my grandfather.

1. If the Great Depression had not happened, Herbert Hoover would have been re-elected in a landslide.
2. If JFK had not been assasinated, Lyndon Johnson would not have been elected in 1964.

What's sad is how much willing suspension of disbelief I have to engage in, to imagine Lieberman as the Dem nominee.

If 9/11 hadn't happened, the election would have been between Bush and Hillary.

Bush reacted wimpily to China in his first test. He's not really very conservative so without his resolution in the War on (Some) Terror he would have been more unattractive a candidate. Hillary could have gone to the right on defense, ignored the gay community and sounded vaguely non-communist to try to get Reagan Democrats back.

If you think Kerry got soft-ball questions, imagine The Smartest Woman in the World's questions, "Senator, how evil is Bush?"

I really don't look forward to Hillary running for President. That race is going to make the last one look like an episode of Touched by an Angel.

Nah, it would have been Gore and Bush would have kicked his butt just as decisively as he kicked Kerry's.

sans 9/11 the stockmarket wouldn't have nosedived and the job market wouldn't have crashed: We wouldn't have a war-deficit nor hundreds of thousands of US troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. The 2001 recession was actually fairly mild as these things go; it was just a bear of a recovery and that was because of 9/11. Plus 9/11 had nothing to do with the political machine Karl Rove spent the last 4 years building. It was only the bad media call in 2000 that suppressed Republican turnout and made the election as close as it was; w/o the lunatic antiwar activists Gore wouldn't have gotten half as much of a vote increase over 2000 as Kerry did.

The trick is if you can get GOP-leaning voters to actually show up and vote they'll slaughter the Democrats every time. Until 2000 the GOP attitude about voter turnout was, "Here's where you vote and the date; see you there!" It was dogma that high-turnout favored the Democrats so they didn't bother trying. They were dead-wrong, of course: If you have a halfway decent candidate and don't let factions split the vote getting the Republican voters to the polls will with the election every time. It's been that way since the 1980s and the Reagan Revolution; there are simply more GOP-leaning than Democrat-leaning voters in battleground states.

Actually, if John Kerry had done a full 12 month tour in Vietnam or had gone out early on a stretcher (with just one uncontestable Purple Heart), he would be President-elect today. His own short sightedness 35 years ago in not staying for his whole tour and exploiting a legitimate loophole was his undoing. Shows the man can't think strategically.

That's a pretty convenient excuse, considering that if 9/11 hadn't happened, Bush's Presidency would have been almost entirely different to date.

I like alternate history scenarios as much as the next guy, but this is just a little farfetched and impossible to verify.

First off, we don't have any real historical perspective on all of the ripples emanating from 9/11 and how they stack up with the Bush administration's actions outside the context of the war on terror. I'm not arguing that 9/11 was not consequential, but that we don't know the full extent of its consequences, and we probably won't know that extent for another at least another decade.

Second off, absent 9/11, I expect that Kerry's strategy would still be a hybrid biography/Bush critique gambit that relied heavily on the "Bush hate" and resentment lingering from the 2000 election. Additionally, Kerry would still have his worst handicap: being John Kerry, with all the baggage that entails.

Among other things, what strikes me about this campaign is that Bush's conduct of the war on terror has left him with significant vulnerabilities (this is an inappropriate forum for discussing those vulnerabilities, so I will not do so). From what I saw, Kerry lost in part because he failed to expose those vulnerabilities.

In the context of a campaign that is not influenced by 9/11, I would expect that President Bush will still have certain vulnerabilities based on his record as incumbent. Based on Kerry's performance in the real campaign, I would also hypothesize that Kerry would fail to exploit those vulnerabilities during the hypothetical (alternate-history) campaign.

So, no, I don't think that we can say with confidence what the absence of 9/11 would have meant, and even then, I don't think that it is likely that the mediocre candidate Kerry could triumph over President Bush.

--|PW|--