Centerfield

Let's see; a nutjob hiding out in Afghanastan attacks us. GW attacks Iraq. 2500 Americans and 350 Billion later, you have the nerve to say:

I doesn't make him the better man than W

The guy is a clueless moron. You know it, I know it. What has he ever accomplished?

“Although I always argue on the anti invasion side when it comes to Iraq, “
You must be relatively new to this site.

Rob, are speaking only of foreign policy?

If so, do you mean besides kicking the Taliban out of Afghanistan and establishing a democracy there, and besidesousting and capturing Saddam Hussein?

I tend to agree with the notion that Bush isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. But some of his policies have merit, and I really only care about how the policies effect us.

Here's the thing: it's not that Bush hasn't accomplished anything, you just don't like what he's accomplished.

A solid majority of Americans still believe that Bush's "disproportional" get-tough response to the advent of domestic terrorism was basically the right way to go. I believe that regardless of who sat in the oval office as of 9/11/2001, we'd have ended up with an aggressive disproportional response policy to address the myriad fears of Americans. And I think the odds are high that it would have included making an example out of a strategically important and regionally unpopular figure like Hussein. The tone and feel might have been different, but a President Al Gore would have waved a bloody flag and rattled his saber or he'd have been booted out in 2004.

"It is my guess that Gore probably would have had a significantly better chance of stopping 9/11. Not because he was a great intellect (he's not), but because he already owned the problem. He'd been involved in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings and the Cole investigation, an probably realized there was a really dangerous enemy. I doesn't make him the better man than W. He just happened to have continuity with previous events. That's a really important factor."
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Just a nitpick, but 9/11 happaned 9 months after Bush took office. The people who had the greatest chance of stopping it WERE Clinton/Gore, the groundwork to create effective counter-terrorism measures needs to be laid YEARS before you see a payoff from those changes on the ground.... just like an operation like 9/11 took YEARS of planning by the terrorist to setup. The culimating event did take place on Bush's watch...but the BEST opportunity to put measures in place to prevent it would have happaned on Clinton/Gore's.

Furthermore, it's not like the President is 007.... he doesn't go out and catch the terrorists himself. It's Presidents ultimate responsibility to pick the best people to put on the task.... THEY are the ones that can actualy make things happen on the ground. That doesn't absolve him of responsibility in the least... if he doesn't have the judgement to pick good people.... he bares ultimate responsibility for the results. But there is the irony of your arguement..... when Bush entered office he kept Clinton/Gore's Counter-Terrorism team INTACT. He did it specificly because he wanted to preserve the continuity that you talk about above. THOSE were the people at the helm of the nation's Counter-Terrorism when 9/11 happaned. If anything THAT was Bush's big mistake..... because it has become patently obvious that those folks (especialy Richard Clarke and George Tenet) were NOT upto the task. However even had Bush had the right people on the job....it's highly questionable to me whether 9/11 could have been prevented. An operation like that has got to be incredibly hard to catch....I hate to call it luck, but alot of time it does come down to factors beyond the control of the people at the helm (like the 1 particularly sharp customs agent that caught the L.A. bomber).

Maybe Gore would have done as you say, but I doubt he would have gone into Iraq the way we did under Bush, i.e. without significant approval from our major allies. I also think if he would have gone into Iraq Gore would have listened more closely to the military experts that recommended higher troop levels. I think he would have done a better job of leveling with the public about the cost and the duration. And I think the whole project would have been handled more efficiently and been more effective. Gore would have probably listened to Colin Powell.

I also think Gore would have been a better administrator than Bush. He was a very involved VP and the Clinton/Gore team was pretty competent at the mundane matters of running things. Remember Clinton shrank the size of the Federal Government to it's lowest level since the Kennedy administration. That's something I don't think you can say about the Bush administration. It's too ideologically driven and it affects their decision making too much. Case in point is the 24 year old resume padding former Bush campaign worker that managed to get himself inserted into a position of power at NASA, which helped to create roadblocks to important public policy information recommendations. I doubt that would have happened under a Gore administration.

I don't think Gore would have been a great president, but I think he would have displayed a higher level of competence than Bush, and I think we would be in a better fiscal position today and we would have a better relationship with our allies too.

Cengel: I'm basing my assessment of gore verses bush on my own personal experience with bureaucracies. My job is so highly specialized that when we got a new administrator, it took three years to train him. An he was a very technically savvy physicist (In fact he's smarter than me). When he first was in charge I wasn't quite sure how to approach him. Was he open minded or vindictive?

Very similar personal dynamics had to occur with the bush transition. If the Clinton team stayed, how much would bush trust their advice and was he approachable to people loyal to his opponent?

If he brought his own team in they would have lost continuity with the past attacks.

So many paragraphs, so little substance.

there is a lot of pipe dreaming about Gore. Maybe because he is not President. If he was, we'd probably kvetch and moan of what an inept job he was doing, the Reps would feast off of the criticism (like the Dems are doing with Bush) and the Dems would over-excuse every mistake he made (like the Reps do with Bush).
Shoot, look at Gore now. Why is he spewing out of the mouth like a rabid dog? He's not in power and it only hurts his image. Do you think he could have been better if he is this way as President?

I don't think Gore would have been a great president, but I think he would have displayed a higher level of competence than Bush.

I don't think I've ever heard fainter praise.

Rachel: Bitter disappointment over the loss of a dream makes people very weird. I don't think you should compare President Gore to citizen Gore.
Besides Bush, Gore, Cheney, Kerry?
I don't see a glimmer of Churchill or Lincoln in any of them.

bk: Yup!

Leadership: So many ways to get it wrong and so few ways to get it right.

A humble leader like Lincoln is smart enough to surround himself with a "team of rivals" to find wisdom through debate.

A centrist leader welcomes robust discussion and treasures the wisdom of the adversarial process.

Now how do we sell this idea to the voters?

BK: Maybe it is faint praise. But I think our deficit would be smaller, our allies closer and our national security at least as good as it is now.

It's a job that's just too big for one man to do well at all of it. The question is not whether person A would be better or worse than person B, but in which spheres A would be better than B and vice versa, and which are important to us.

Frankly, right now, for me what's important is national defense, and Gore is as clueless as most of other other Democratic leaders. As a result, I cannot concur his election would have been better than Bush's for the US.

Ahh, reading from the GOP talking points again, are we? Reflexes are so much easier than thinking. Never mind that Gore went to Vietnam, which gives him more combat experience than Cheney (five deferments) and W (my old man got me into the Guard) W combined.

Somehow, I doubt President Gore would have taken a month's vacation when his CIA director was telling him there was a major upswing in chatter, or his Secretary of State would have ignored a briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US", both of which were produced by the very CIA that cengal derides. Gore understood warnings and followed them; that's why there was no Y2K disaster as so many predicted.

Indeed, if his recommedations on airline security had been followed, instead of brushed aside by the GOP Congress at the behest of the industy, then there might have been no 9/11 in the first place.

Even if there had been, Gore wouldn't have hired Wolfowitz, so he would not have sent a full scale army into Iraq. He certainly wouldn't have pranced around an aircraft carrier pretending to be Top Gun. There's nothing more clueless than pouring billions upon billions down a rat hole in search of weapons that don't exist; unless it's giving trillions in tax breaks to the top 1%.

I've listened to many speeches by Mr. Gore, and he's yet to display any bitterness over the way the SCOTUS stole his rightful office. Like Truman, he tells the truth; the GOP just thinks it's Hell.

Paul: Good point.

The Job of the president is one of the toughest position ever created. Yet the current crop of candidates (on both sides of the isle) seem to covet it just to say, “I won”. In times of peace and plenty that doesn't really matter as much. Unfortunately in time of crisis you end up with a man like Hoover. When the great depression came it seems like he let his ideology override the reality. He just wasn't mentally equipped to “think outside the box”.

In modern times, the huge amounts of money required to win a national election, coupled with the strangle hold extreme elements have on the primary process, produces some very lame candidates. I can't see any of them willing to be challenged with alternate view. I've always had the impression that Powell was forced out because he kept saying things that clashed with ideology.

It was the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia (defending it from Iraq) that caused Al qaeda to start laying plans for 9/11. What a mess!

Soemthing missed by those who hail the elder Bush's "wisdom" in stopping at Kuwait and leaving Saddam in power. If we had ousted Saddam in 1991, or just provided air support to the Shia and Kurds so they could have broken away, we would not have needed to keep troops in Saudi Arabia afterwards and Al Qaeda would have had no reason to form.

Easy one: It is petty Human Emotions over riding better human Judgement.

Bob, President Bush was a staunch isolationist during the campaign. He wanted to withdraw the U.S. from what he considered the overly-interventionist Clinton Presidency. After 9/11, he did most definitely did think "outside the box". "Inside the box" thinking was to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan, then return to the status quo.

President Bush recognized that the prime cause behind the rise of Al Qaeda was the theocracies and dictatorships which repress their population and use race-baiting, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism to keep their impoverished, uneducated populations under control. Those problems had remained unchanged for many years, despite isolation, sanctions, etc. Our "real politik" of making allies with the governments of Saudia Arabia and Egypt and, for a time, Iraq, because they were "secular" rather than theocratic like Iran, had failed.

So invading Iraq was definitely thinking "outside the box". Whether you agree with the decision or not, of course, is a different matter, but it is not accurate to claim President Bush is incapable of "shifting gears" or looking at things with a new perspective.

Pat: I don't think it's a valid argument to call the Iraq invasion, "thinking outside the Box". There were numerous accounts of the Bush team wanting to attack Iraq prior to 9/11. If I remember correctly Cheney and Rumsfeld had been publicly advocating this action for years. Basically, this was just a repackaging of a long advocated position.

Well you guys both have something of a point. I definitely recall people suggesting prior to 9/11 that Bush would jump at an excuse to oust Hussein. But I never did actually read or see anything that connected such ideas to the horse's mouth. It was really more of a case of, IMO, democrats suggesting that Bush was a closet war-monger. Ultimately I doubt whether the ultimate source of these stories was insider info, or instead, anti-Bush forces taking advantage of liberal America's willingness to accept that any Republican is inherently a closet war monger.

I absolutely do recall multiple instances where Bush himself expressed a straightforward reticence to involve America directly in conflicts overseas. He was most direct in declaring that it was up to Israel and Palestine to resolve their differences. This view was met favorably in isolationist GOP circles. I recall it so clearly because I regularly pointed it out as concrete evidence of his naive, wishful idiocy. So IMO, point to Pat. It's to Bush's credit that he woke up and smelled the coffee.

This is not to say, however, that nimble changes in policy direction in response to events is a Bush strong suit. He strikes me as far more stubborn than most, and less likely to think outside the box than most. After all, every person has the potential to think outside the box. It's really just a question of whether a big enough shock occurs to get the given person to notice that that there's a box, and that there's stuff outside it. If 9/11 doesn't qualify as such a shock, what would?