So let’s say Clinton sunk like Gary Hart in ’92 after the Gennifer Flowers thing (woman can you not even spell your name right, what the fuck) and the Democrats rolled out Paul Tsongas or Jerry Brown or some such again. The big question is, does Ross Perot feel the need to jump in again, and I’m guessing he probably does, because a Texan with money will always think he knows best about everything.
Thing is, I firmly believe and will to my dying day that the Perot voter is at heart a Trump voter, wanting someone who is not a politician and who knows about running a business so obviously he knows about government (which is like saying your car mechanic can fix a Porsche so obviously he knows how to do your open heart surgery, duh). I strongly suspect that at least 2/3 of Perot’s support would have gone to Bush in the end had he dropped out. And he did at one point, presumably because he thought the Democrats represented enough change, but then jumped back in, and I can’t even remember all the nonsense. But the thing is, Ross Perot is batshit loon ball head trauma crazy and he got 19% of the vote in 1992 and still got 9% in 1996, in case you ever wonder how Trump happened.
Anyway.
I think Bush beats Tsongas or Brown straight up, thus leading to another four years of “omg why do the Democrats keep running all these Yankees out there to get their asses kicked,” but I don’t think Bush shifts the Congress at all. In a three-way fight with Perot and Bush and $YANKEE_DEM, I think Perot might have had a plausible claim to be the only real change candidate since $YANKEE_DEM is just another Mondale or Dukakis, but I don’t think it’s enough to tip the balance back to the Democrats.
Really, the only success for a Democrat running for the White House, not an incumbent, has come in times of trauma. 1976, 1992, 2008. You have to go back to 1960 to see a non-incumbent Democrat get elected in what is a reasonably prosperous economy. Maybe $YANKEE_DEM can pull it off, but I severely doubt it. Don’t forget, the Democrats of today got here because of Clinton winning, the impact of the DLC, and eight years of pushing back against Bush and the Iraq war, and twenty years of pushing back against a Confederate GOP. At this point in history, the Republicans are using South as prescribed on the package, not taking a couple extra to get high. A big chunk of the South in Congress is still reliably Democratic, mostly with plenty of mileage and veteran experience.
Which brings up the question: does the GOP still take the Congress in 1994? I think not. Sixth-year gains are almost impossible to make, and while there would certainly be casualties from the House Post Office scandal and the like, you also don’t have the “we are running against Clinton” effect to nationalize the races. Consider also that the right-wing radio of the time was as likely to take shots at Bush for his lack of efficacy; you didn’t have the unified monolithic Mighty Wurlitzer of conservative media that would be forged by the time Fox News broke on the scene in 1996 or so. So maybe you end up with a wash: the GOP gets stronger, maybe tips the balance in one house, but unified control doesn’t happen, especially not in the Senate. If the House does flip for the first time since 1954, you suddenly have Newt Gingrich as the firebrand making things tougher for Bush, and the 1996 Democrat can run against him just the way Clinton and Gore did in reality.
And then…what? You need a Democrat in the White House in order to unify the GOP post-Cold War, because especially as they increase their dosage of South, they need a devil. Clinton was easy, because he came with moral baggage and a second-wave feminist wife, thus teeing up an easy mark for the Talibaptists. Maybe in 1996, your Democrat is…Al Gore. Solid, studious, beyond reproach. Military service, divinity school, impeccable pedigree, Southern accent, and a wife most famous for crusading against dirty lyrics in rock music. Probably going up against the likes of Dan Quayle or Bob Dole, either of whom he could beat in a walk after sixteen years of GOP control of the White House and, let’s face it, an economy that’s probably as stultified as it was in 1992 given that you won’t get the kind of tax package Clinton made happen in 1993 to calm the markets re: inflation and deficit control.
And there’s no Fox News yet. There’s no Mighty Wurlitzer to push the “sighing lying Al Gore” meme. Hell, the whole “invented the Internet” thing couldn’t get legs in 1996 because most voters were just getting around to figuring out what the Internet was. There would be shots, there would be obstacles, but in the grand scheme of things, solid stolid Al beats “P-O-T-A-T-O-E” Quayle.
So in 1996, Al Gore fills in that last line on his resume and becomes President. Probably appoints Hillary to be Secretary of HHS, in all likelihood. Maybe the Congress completes the Southern flip anyway by 1998, but it’s not bloody likely there’s something to impeach him with. Probably gets re-elected in 2000 off the back of the Internet boom, probably doesn’t toss away the daily brief on August 6, 2001 with the “all right, you’ve covered your ass” dismissal, probably don’t get the same caliber of attack on September 11 as a result, and as a result, don’t get an endless war in Asia. But more importantly, the Republicans are deprived of Clinton, of impeachment, of an eternal September 12, of the panicked patriotic rallying behind a President who wasn’t all that different from Trump in anything but style.
The contemporary GOP was built on the tripod of Clinton hating, flipping Congress and 9/11. Take one of those away and everything changes. Take all three away and who knows? Gore is likely to generate about as many scandals as Obama, and it’s a hell of a lot harder to build nightly outrage on the prospect of his being a secret Muslim born in Kenya. Fox News viewers may have a lot tougher time building the rage for someone who looks and sounds like they do if they don’t have an obvious peg to hang the evil on.
I mean, yes, you can say there’s always something. John Kerry got cut to ribbons over his Vietnam service and his response to it. But that was after the machine had a decade to hone itself. I have no doubt that had he stayed in the Senate and never been VP or run for President before, an Al Gore race in 2004 would have looked equally bloody. And thus we get to the point of this whole counterfactual: it’s not enough to win at the polls so long as the machine is in place, because the Mighty Wurlitzer is the party now. The GOP is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Newscorp Hate Machine. Winning the race will only go so far until you can break the machine, and given the median age of the Fox viewing audience, it’s only a matter of time before it fractures. The question is, can we hold the world together until then…