The American Freedom Network

What if McCain had won in 2000?

In reading this Time Magazine article on the strained Bush-McCain relationship, I paused to think about what might have been. (Granted, Time’s coverage of Mac is positive in proportion to his GOP heterodoxy, and I’ve never been a McCainiac, per se.)
If Bush dirty tricks hadn’t sunk McCain in South Carolina, we might have seen a Gore-McCain battle in 2000. Given Gore’s performance then, his ‘misunderestimation’ of Bush (as a candidate), and Clinton fatigue, it’s obviously not a science to try and guess who would’ve won. Who would Mac have picked for V.P.? Would it have made a difference? A shrug on both counts.
What makes this worth my time to write (and, I hope, yours to read) is to imagine how McCain would’ve responded to 9/11. The Time article gives the impression that he was appalled by Bush’s cavalier attitude toward going to war with Iraq. if so, there would be a case to be made that President McCain would’ve taken us into Afghanistan, but perhaps not into Iraq. We might have avoided a five-year, no-win war that may only now be producing some hope of stability on the ground. Resources sent there might’ve gone into Afghanistan. The candidate who declared during one of last summer’s debates that he’d follow bin Laden ‘to the gates of Hell’ might just have succeeded in making Osama our Ambassador to the Court of Satan, with a quicker posting thereto than is now likely the case. our Army and Marine Corps wouldn’t be overextended, our standing in the world would be higher, and the five-year resident of the Hanio Hilton likely would’ve stopped Abu Gharibs from happening, or at least stopped them, cold, if they did occur.
On the home front, Mac would’ve never let Walter Reed Hospital fester in patient-care scandal, nor would the VA system have been neglected. The caskets of fallen soldiers would’ve been greeted by sunlight, as the honor of their passengers deserves, not, by policy, whisked off planes unloading their mournful cargo in darkness, as if in shame.
In short, it’s easy to imagine one war, in place of two, and better execution, as well. it’s easy to imagine that other issues would’ve irratated conservatives – ‘Campaign Finance Reform,’ no tax cuts, etc., but maybe we’d have been spared No Child Left Behind and alberto Gonzalez, too.
Clinton had eight years to do something about bin Laden, going back to the first WTC bombing in 1993; Bush ’43 had eight months. My last musing is this: Would a McCain Administration have used their first eight months more effectively? Would they have stopped 9/11? If not, we might’ve taken solace in having devoted all our effort to catching bin Laden, which should have been our principal concern after the smoke cleared.
-Lloyd A. Conway