A True October Surprise (A Wikibox TL)
- Thread starter lord caedus
- Start date
There were subtle indicators, but nothing that someone not in the know about Crane's alcoholism could pick up on. In '92 only people who worked with Crane in the House, or on the campaign really knew that he had a problem and the general public had no idea.
That said, by 2000, Crane's alcoholism has become public knowledge, as former staffers and colleagues came forward and the informal silence on the topic disappeared once he went into rehab in 1995.
Thanks. I figured that liberal Republicans should get one last hurrah ITTL before they disappear from the national scene.
New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Washington State probably tipped red due to Weicker.
Uh oh...that doesn't sound good.
The good news (for liberal Republicans) is that they lasted a bit longer than OTL but liberal Republicans were already getting increasingly thin on the ground by the time of the POD, so saving them isn't really feasible.
Assuming the majority of Weicker voters would have went to Huddleston, in addition to the three listed above the following would have likely been won: Florida, Indiana, Iowa, & Virginia.
Part 20: Huddleston Presidency (1992-1996)
President Huddleston's long coattails in the election gave the Democrats in Congress a strong incentive to pass more "bread and butter" legislation that would be popular with voters. The first proposal, the negative income tax proposal promised by Huddleston during his campaign, was planned to be the centerpiece of the 103rd Congress and Speaker Foley and newly-elected Senate Majority Leader Dodd kicked off discussion soon after the new congress convened. Things almost immediately went south. Republicans in both chambers objected strongly to implementing the proposed negative income tax (NIT) scheme, saying it would enable jobless adults to forgo looking for work and pointing out the massive amount of legislation that would have to be modified or repealed in order to make the plan feasible.
By this time, the press had unearthed several scandals that regarding congressional corruption, mostly implicating Democrats, who had controlled Congress almost continuously since the 1950s. This was compounded by the resignation of both Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Chief of Staff Carroll Hubbard in the same week following an federal investigations into financial irregularities reported by cabinet members. The resignation in disgrace of the president's chief of staff (followed by Hubbard's eventual prison sentence that Huddleston commuted before leaving office in 1997) gave the Republicans a strong rallying cry, promising to root out congressional corruption and implement tax and tort reform while also "restoring government to its proper size and sphere".
The 1994 midterms resulted in a massive swing against the Democratic leadership. Speaker Foley became the first sitting speaker to lose his own seat since Galusha Grow in 1862 as the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years. The 12-seat majority the Democrats had in the Senate prior to the election was nearly wiped away as the GOP picked up 10 seats in the upper house.
Relations between President Huddleston and the new speaker, Dick Cheney of Wyoming, were among the worst between a sitting president and speaker in post-war history and were not aided in the least by Cheney's outspoken opposition to the president's negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who had eventually won the behind-the-scenes struggle to succeed Grishin), something the lame-duck Huddleston considered crucially important to his legacy. The flow of legislation that had remained nearly constant (only being disrupted during the twilight years of the Humphrey administration) since the Great Depression nearly ground to a halt as Cheney, feeling empowered by a majority, pushed for the implementation of the program the GOP had promised, only deviating in exchange for concessions from the administration or Senate Democrats.
...President Huddleston's final term, like his first, kept him very active on the foreign policy scene. Gorbachev's ascension had given him a willing partner in negotiations to finally ease the end of the Cold War, something both leaders had privately felt was a senseless conflict, especially with the Soviet Union now facing visible economic problems. Meetings between American and Soviet officials throughout 1995 and 1996 in Switzerland over issues such as nuclear stockpile reduction, NATO, Eastern Europe and the Baltics, proxy conflicts in the Third World and other international agreements led to the massive agreement known as the Bern Accords.
The Bern Accords are viewed by historians as marking the de facto end of the Cold War and were the sole bright spot in an otherwise dim era of the Huddleston presidency that was beset by scandals from multiple executive agencies. The Accords, while on its face a series of compromise between the two superpowers, was in fact a massive American victory, with only a few token concessions given to the USSR (agreeing to prevent the former Warsaw Pact states from entering into multinational defense arrangements- which eased fears of foreign encroachment on the former Soviet sphere) that saw the threat of Soviet military or nuclear strike effectively ended in exchange for an end to informal hostilities that had handicapped the ability of Gorbachev and the Soviet state from moving their economic direction in a more manageable direction....
President Huddleston's second term saw him able to appoint two more justices to the Supreme Court, with the retirement of Byron White in 1993 and his replacement by David S. Tatel, who became the first blind Supreme Court justice. Associate Justice Homer Thornberry died in December 1995 and Huddleston's initial choice, former congressman Theo Mitchell of South Carolina, had his nomination withdrawn when it was learned Mitchell had violated federal finance laws during his failed re-election campaign in 1994. The scandal-embittered president then picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C. Court of Appeals who was confirmed easily.
By this time, the press had unearthed several scandals that regarding congressional corruption, mostly implicating Democrats, who had controlled Congress almost continuously since the 1950s. This was compounded by the resignation of both Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy and Chief of Staff Carroll Hubbard in the same week following an federal investigations into financial irregularities reported by cabinet members. The resignation in disgrace of the president's chief of staff (followed by Hubbard's eventual prison sentence that Huddleston commuted before leaving office in 1997) gave the Republicans a strong rallying cry, promising to root out congressional corruption and implement tax and tort reform while also "restoring government to its proper size and sphere".
The 1994 midterms resulted in a massive swing against the Democratic leadership. Speaker Foley became the first sitting speaker to lose his own seat since Galusha Grow in 1862 as the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years. The 12-seat majority the Democrats had in the Senate prior to the election was nearly wiped away as the GOP picked up 10 seats in the upper house.
Relations between President Huddleston and the new speaker, Dick Cheney of Wyoming, were among the worst between a sitting president and speaker in post-war history and were not aided in the least by Cheney's outspoken opposition to the president's negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (who had eventually won the behind-the-scenes struggle to succeed Grishin), something the lame-duck Huddleston considered crucially important to his legacy. The flow of legislation that had remained nearly constant (only being disrupted during the twilight years of the Humphrey administration) since the Great Depression nearly ground to a halt as Cheney, feeling empowered by a majority, pushed for the implementation of the program the GOP had promised, only deviating in exchange for concessions from the administration or Senate Democrats.
...President Huddleston's final term, like his first, kept him very active on the foreign policy scene. Gorbachev's ascension had given him a willing partner in negotiations to finally ease the end of the Cold War, something both leaders had privately felt was a senseless conflict, especially with the Soviet Union now facing visible economic problems. Meetings between American and Soviet officials throughout 1995 and 1996 in Switzerland over issues such as nuclear stockpile reduction, NATO, Eastern Europe and the Baltics, proxy conflicts in the Third World and other international agreements led to the massive agreement known as the Bern Accords.
The Bern Accords are viewed by historians as marking the de facto end of the Cold War and were the sole bright spot in an otherwise dim era of the Huddleston presidency that was beset by scandals from multiple executive agencies. The Accords, while on its face a series of compromise between the two superpowers, was in fact a massive American victory, with only a few token concessions given to the USSR (agreeing to prevent the former Warsaw Pact states from entering into multinational defense arrangements- which eased fears of foreign encroachment on the former Soviet sphere) that saw the threat of Soviet military or nuclear strike effectively ended in exchange for an end to informal hostilities that had handicapped the ability of Gorbachev and the Soviet state from moving their economic direction in a more manageable direction....
President Huddleston's second term saw him able to appoint two more justices to the Supreme Court, with the retirement of Byron White in 1993 and his replacement by David S. Tatel, who became the first blind Supreme Court justice. Associate Justice Homer Thornberry died in December 1995 and Huddleston's initial choice, former congressman Theo Mitchell of South Carolina, had his nomination withdrawn when it was learned Mitchell had violated federal finance laws during his failed re-election campaign in 1994. The scandal-embittered president then picked Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the D.C. Court of Appeals who was confirmed easily.
The same reason they won it IOTL: Olympia Snowe ran for the Senate instead and John Baldacci had the right combination of local name recognition, family connections (being George Mitchell's cousin) and fit ideologically with his district better than the Republican challenger.
Part 21: United States presidential election, 1996
By 1996 it had become clear that voters were frustrated with the stalemate that had enveloped between President Huddleston and Speaker Cheney. Both men had become unpopular and while the Democrats at least could focus on the presumptive nominee, Vice President Blanchard, and shuffle the lame duck president into the background, Cheney refused to take a back seat during the presidential primaries, although being careful to not antagonize any candidate.
Vice President Blanchard romped to an easy victory over a handful of third-rate contenders in the primaries to get become the Democratic nominee. Blanchard, realizing that being the number two to a president with low approval ratings and whose administration had been dogged by controversy, eschewed the selection of another southerner who could attract "Huddleston Democrats" and picked California Senator Barbara Boxer as his running mate, making her the first woman and first Jewish person to make it on a major-party ticket.
The Republican side was where most of the primary excitement and moment was. Pete Wilson, the governor of California, had hitched himself to the Secure Borders Act and won re-election in 1994. Between his appeal to working-class whites concerned about immigration and his ability to seem both a moderate and a staunch conservative, Wilson emerged from the harsh primary season to become the Republican nominee. He selected former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander as his running mate, hoping to swing the south back into Republican hands.
Despite the Republicans' selection of a candidate who could appeal to their party while at the same time getting enough support from undecided voters, their path to the White House suddenly became much more difficult with the entrance of Fob James into the presidential race. James, the socially conservative governor of Alabama, gathered support from various Christian fundamentalist groups that felt that the Republican Party had ignored them following the groups' reemergence into the political arena following the backlash against the Johnson and Humphrey administrations in the 1970s. James, running on a "Values Party" ticket, selected right-wing Congressman Bob Dornan of California as his running mate, and proposed a social program that critics called reactionary and medieval, and included erasing the separation of church and state, making abortion illegal and removing many of the rights gays and lesbians had won since the 1960s.
With Wilson not being trusted by conservatives and James being the "southern candidate" in the election, throughout quite a bit of the campaign, Blanchard was in the lead as James took almost entirely from the Republican ticket. Although it wasn't known at the time, James' bid hinged entirely on this spoiler effect his campaign would have that his team thought would cause Blanchard to win and make the Republicans more receptive to a candidate the Christian hard-right would find acceptable.
That all came to a crashing halt as a result of the vice-presidential debates. At the time of the debates, James was polling around 10 percent nationally, and leading in several Deep South states. During the debates, however, Dornan, known for his inflammatory and outrageous statements, called those who voted for Boxer (also from California) "latte-sipping bisexuals" and called Alexander "a slimy little, no-backbone coward". The James campaign went into damage control mode as the country reacted in outrage, but the damage was done.
With James' campaign imploding as a result of both Dornan's statements and the courting of soft evangelical supporters by the Wilson campaign, Pete Wilson won his election to the White House. In the wake of the James collapse, Wilson swept the south and was able to win several key swing states. Despite this, enough James voters stayed loyal in California to deny Wilson the victory in his home state, the first time a candidate won a presidential election while losing his home state since Woodrow Wilson had done so 80 years before.
Vice President Blanchard romped to an easy victory over a handful of third-rate contenders in the primaries to get become the Democratic nominee. Blanchard, realizing that being the number two to a president with low approval ratings and whose administration had been dogged by controversy, eschewed the selection of another southerner who could attract "Huddleston Democrats" and picked California Senator Barbara Boxer as his running mate, making her the first woman and first Jewish person to make it on a major-party ticket.
The Republican side was where most of the primary excitement and moment was. Pete Wilson, the governor of California, had hitched himself to the Secure Borders Act and won re-election in 1994. Between his appeal to working-class whites concerned about immigration and his ability to seem both a moderate and a staunch conservative, Wilson emerged from the harsh primary season to become the Republican nominee. He selected former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander as his running mate, hoping to swing the south back into Republican hands.
Despite the Republicans' selection of a candidate who could appeal to their party while at the same time getting enough support from undecided voters, their path to the White House suddenly became much more difficult with the entrance of Fob James into the presidential race. James, the socially conservative governor of Alabama, gathered support from various Christian fundamentalist groups that felt that the Republican Party had ignored them following the groups' reemergence into the political arena following the backlash against the Johnson and Humphrey administrations in the 1970s. James, running on a "Values Party" ticket, selected right-wing Congressman Bob Dornan of California as his running mate, and proposed a social program that critics called reactionary and medieval, and included erasing the separation of church and state, making abortion illegal and removing many of the rights gays and lesbians had won since the 1960s.
With Wilson not being trusted by conservatives and James being the "southern candidate" in the election, throughout quite a bit of the campaign, Blanchard was in the lead as James took almost entirely from the Republican ticket. Although it wasn't known at the time, James' bid hinged entirely on this spoiler effect his campaign would have that his team thought would cause Blanchard to win and make the Republicans more receptive to a candidate the Christian hard-right would find acceptable.
That all came to a crashing halt as a result of the vice-presidential debates. At the time of the debates, James was polling around 10 percent nationally, and leading in several Deep South states. During the debates, however, Dornan, known for his inflammatory and outrageous statements, called those who voted for Boxer (also from California) "latte-sipping bisexuals" and called Alexander "a slimy little, no-backbone coward". The James campaign went into damage control mode as the country reacted in outrage, but the damage was done.
With James' campaign imploding as a result of both Dornan's statements and the courting of soft evangelical supporters by the Wilson campaign, Pete Wilson won his election to the White House. In the wake of the James collapse, Wilson swept the south and was able to win several key swing states. Despite this, enough James voters stayed loyal in California to deny Wilson the victory in his home state, the first time a candidate won a presidential election while losing his home state since Woodrow Wilson had done so 80 years before.
Deleted member 9338
I am enjoy this. It also has me looking up politicians I know little about.
Constantinople
Banned
Oh god Pete Wilson as POTUS....
Although, I guess the potential to do an uber-immigration blunder is there, making minorities hate the GOP even *more* than in OTL if that's possible. You *have* to be going in that direction.... I mean think about what just his anti-immigrant push did to California alone (with the wider implications).. just imagine it on a wider scale...
Although, I guess the potential to do an uber-immigration blunder is there, making minorities hate the GOP even *more* than in OTL if that's possible. You *have* to be going in that direction.... I mean think about what just his anti-immigrant push did to California alone (with the wider implications).. just imagine it on a wider scale...
The Supreme Court is solidly liberal in the TL, I don't think they'll let Wilson have a free hand. Plus the Democrats have control of the Senate.
Isn't the normal limit for presidential infoboxes either win a state or get over 5.0% of the vote?
I'm guessing either because he was close enough to that, or because he was considered to be important at the time (polling-wise and in the debates).
I love the leadership you've chosen for the Senate and House there!!
Huh. I haven't met that many people who like either Chris Dodd OR Dick Cheney, much less both of them.
Thanks. Having people who were semi-obscure or died prematurely IOTL rise to prominence in ATLs is one of my favorite things about the genre and so that's why I like putting such people into positions of power in my TLs.
The immigration thing came immediately to my mind once I decided he would be the GOP nominee and Huddleston's successor as POTUS. It will come up again.
Both actually, but especially the latter. You've got to imagine that ITTL, inclusion in the presidential debates is another criteria for automatic inclusion on the infobox, owing to the James-Dornan campaign's self-inflicted wound in '96.
Paul V McNutt
Banned
OTL Homer Thornberry retired from the appeals court in 1978. wWhen I have him on the Supreme Court, I always have him retire then. t That way President Carter appoints Shirley Hoffstedder.