A True October Surprise (A Wikibox TL)

[lord caedus]

President Huddleston would begin his term with on a positive note. The Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the new president began a strong push through of the party's agenda that had been blocked by the presence of a Republican in the White House. Secretary of State Mondale opened negotiations with Panama that resulted in the Huddleston-Noriega Treaty that would see control over the Panama Canal given to Panama on December 31, 2004. This resulted in a fierce outrage from conservatives in the Senate, whose filibuster attempt failed as a result of the lack of cohesion among them. The Department of Health and Human Services began a strong push to educate the public on relevant health matters, including HIV/AIDS, drug use and, to the consternation of the president, who had previously been a strong advocate of cigarette companies in the Senate, the health risks of legal vices like smoking and drinking. The Department of Energy's similar effort to calm post-Kahuta fears about nuclear power were unsuccessful and Huddleston bowed to political pressure to implement a moratorium on nuclear power plants, which greatly set back the national effort begun under President Humphrey to move towards more renewable energy sources...

The international situation Huddleston inherited as in a state of flux. The Warsaw Pact's decay during his term was rapid: by the end of 1989, Germany was reunited for the first time since the end of World War II and the communist governments of Czechoslovakia and Hungary had fallen. Romania's brutal and egocentric dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was overthrown in a revolution and shot, while the Polish communist government, fearing a similar Romania-style revolt with a simmering population tired of martial law and the repressive nature of the regime, abruptly caved into to their opponent's demands of free elections and and end to the command economy, all in exchange for the implicit understanding that former regime leaders would not face criminal prosecution for any actions they had committed.

The People's Republic of China was faced with its biggest challenge since the uncertain period immediately after Mao Zedong's death when protesters, largely university students fed up with official corruption and the lack of human and political rights, began a massive pro-democracy protest in Beijing in 1989. The protests captured world attention and the subsequent response by the Communist Party to send in the army to crush the peaceful protesters led to the permanent souring of western opinion on Deng Xiaoping, who had previously been popular in Washington for his economic reforms and leading the PRC into open negotiations with the United States.

By 1991, the Soviet Union was the only member of the Warsaw Pact to remain communist and, despite the hopes of pro-democracy reformists within the USSR, the Communist party-state apparatus remained strong, ruthlessly quashing any deviation from the party line. Little change to the Soviet economy, which needed deep structural reforms, had taken place and Grishin refused to deviate from standard Soviet economic policy of gigantic investments in the military and heavy industry with a pittance for consumer goods even as his Council of Ministers repeatedly warned of the dire long-term projections for the Soviet state should this pattern continue....

In the face of the transition away from a bipolar world, Huddleston ignited a political firestorm when he proposed the Secure Borders Act in 1991. The act would drastically reduce immigration into the United States and make it impossible for illegal immigrants to become citizens. The bill, which liberals condemned as a backdoor to prevent non-white immigration to the United States, saw a massive backlash within the Democratic Party against Huddleston, who had previously been backed by almost all of the congressional caucus. Liberal Democratic opponents of the act were joined by an unusual assortment of allies: the almost-deceased liberal Republicans who had clung to survival, business-oriented Republicans and Hispanic members from both parties (except for Cuban-American representatives owing to the special policies regarding Cuban immigrants). Organized labor largely followed the president's lead, with teacher's unions notably breaking the fold to oppose the act.

In the end, the act narrowly passed the House after Speaker Tom Foley was able to keep enough members of his divided caucus from voting against the act, sending the bill to the Senate. There, with the chamber's liberals and pro-business Republicans staunchly opposed, the bill died, damaging Huddleston politically and playing no small part in shaping events for the 1992 presidential election...

When Associate Justice Arthur Goldberg died in January 1990, it had been nearly nine years since the composition of the Supreme Court changed and Huddleston's victory in 1988 would allow at least part of the liberal/liberal-leaning majority to be replaced with younger members. After Goldberg's death, Chief Justice Brennan, who had been on the court for nearly 35 years, announced his retirement, citing his age (83) and ill health. Huddleston, correctly gauging the mood of the Senate, picked another southern moderate, Gilbert Merritt to become the new chief justice and a liberal, Stephen Breyer, to take Goldberg's place. A year later, Thurgood Marshall, the nation's first black Supreme Court justice, retired and Huddleston replaced him with the nation's second black justice, Harry Edwards.

 

[lord caedus]

President Huddleston's push for the Secure Borders Act had enraged several factions in his party, who had never really accepted Huddleston as the party's standard-bearer and a primary challenger emerged in the form of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson of Illinois. Jackson believed that he would be joined by others of the party's liberal wing to make his campaign a credible challenge to the president, but a combination of political calculation (replacing a moderate sitting president for a stridently liberal black man who had never held elective office) and Jackson's own inflammatory statements about Jews (notably referring to New York City as "hymietown") kept the campaign a combination of vanity project and protest against Huddleston that stood no chance of taking the nomination. Nevertheless, Jackson succeeded in damaging Huddleston and made the Democrats wary of the fall campaign.

On the Republican side, the party's top-tier candidates had previously been content to sit out 1992, viewing facing Huddleston as an uphill struggle with no clear chance of success. However, the Secure Borders Act had caused the president's approval ratings to sink to approachable levels and several, like Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, attempted to jump in to the primary field at the last minute. The results, like the 1980 Democratic primaries, were disastrous. The Republican Party's rules about winner-take-all primaries and a very divided vote led to the frontrunner (and eventual nominee) becoming Illinois Congressman Phil Crane. Crane selected Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran as his running mate, making the ticket the most conservative the Republicans had nominated in over two decades.

Crane had been a vocal right-wing member of the House Republicans for over a decade and his selection as the Republican nominee led to the party's moderate and nearly-defunct liberal wing to bolt. Along with Jackson supporters, they coalesced around former Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, whose independent candidacy would be a vehicle for liberal dissatisfaction with the two major parties. Weicker's campaign initially hoped to name Jackson as the vice presidential nominee to increase cross-party appeal, but Jackson declined, planning on making a bid for the presidency in 1996 as a Democrat. Instead, former Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson, a fierce Crane critic, came out of retirement to be Weicker's running mate.

The election campaign was one of the oddest on record. The death of Soviet leader Viktor Grishin in April and the establishment of a troika (with Mikhail Gorbachev, Grigory Romanov and Viktor Chebrikov sharing power) caused foreign policy to take the center stage, which benefited Huddleston. The Crane campaign was also hurt by Dan Crane, Phil Crane's younger brother and fellow congressmen, having lost re-election in 1988 after it had emerged that he had an affair with a 17 year-old intern and the candidate's refusal to distance himself from his brother. The Huddleston campaign also attempted to mollify left-wing critics by announcing a plan to discuss implementing a negative income tax.

Weicker, surprisingly for an third-party candidate, polled as high as 15% in some polls, but his support slowly bled away as Election Day approached, with most votes going to Huddleston as Crane floundered.

Weicker was unable to win a single state, but his presence caused Crane to win several states that otherwise would have likely went to Huddleston had the former senator not run, preventing a crushing Democratic victory. As it was, Crane failed to win his home state of Illinois and for the first time since 1964, the majority of the South went Democratic. The congressional elections saw a massive Democratic victory, with the party controlling 62 seats in the Senate after the election and a majority of nearly 40 seats in the House.

 

[lord caedus]

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.

 

[lord caedus]

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.

 

[lord caedus]

The Republican wave years of 1994 and 1996 landed both the White House and both chambers of Congress in Republican hands for the first time since 1955, and President Wilson intended to seize on what the party viewed as a mandate for change. The Tax Fairness Act slashed the top marginal tax rates down to nearly 40% while the Welfare Reform Act of 1997 overhauled the nation's unemployment safety net, giving states more control over the program while imposing a ten year lifetime cap (effective January 1, 1998) on the program's availability.

Welfare reform proved to be extremely popular with the conservatives within the party and Wilson, hoping to make a strong showing among the group to prevent another right-wing third-party run in 2000, acceded to demands to co-opt the immigration issue by having Speaker Cheney introduce the Crime and Immigration Control Act of 1997 (CICA). The act, pushed strongly by conservatives from the Sun Belt, was envisioned as an "all-in-one" law that would formalize strict law-and-order policing on a national level and hopefully prevent illegal immigration by making the legal environment for such perspective immigrants unpalatable. The result, however, was that the act shocked the Democrats and political establishment in its harshness and stripping discretionary power on several issues dealing with illegal immigrants using public resources away from states and municipalities (including public education, welfare, Medicare and even providing drivers' licenses or identification cards) and make them subject to the acts' provisions. The act also pushed for strict standards for mandatory sentencing and implementing such laws for almost every felony, again at the expense of states.

The backlash to these acts was immediate and fierce. Hispanic groups notably were outraged and Senate Democrats notably succeeded in forcing several extremely onerous provisions of CICA to be removed, but could not prevent the act from passing. The Supreme Court (where only one justice had been appointed by a Republican president) found even more portions of CICA unconstitutional, effectively nullifying the most egregious portions of it. But the battle lines had been drawn and Wilson, Cheney and Senate Majority Leader Alan Simpson were confident that their legislative program would prevent midterm losses.

While the Senate barely remained in Republican hands (owing to the lopsided amount of Democratic seats up for re-election that year), the plan backfired as minority communities, who they felt had been targeted almost exclusively by the Wilson program, came out in droves firmly on the Democratic side, flipping the House back to the Democrats. Undoubtedly, this was helped by both Cheney's unpopularity with voters as well as the resignations of several high-profile Republicans (notably House Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia) as a result of scandal.

Somewhat chastened, Wilson nonetheless was able to work with the new Speaker, David Bonior of Michigan, to implement some of his policies, including tort reform and deficit reduction, the latter of which, while popular in the abstract, ended up being disliked by the party's business supporters as it rested on increases on corporate tax rates (while balanced out by decreases in several aid programs beloved by the Democratic base).

...The president had his hands full with foreign affairs upon taking over from his predecessor. Despite the Bern Accords ending the Cold War, many Americans were not quite ready to accept a defeated Soviet Union and the so-called Baltic Coup briefly rekindled fears of a renewed Cold War. As part of the Bern Accords, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to bind the communist state to several international agreements, several of which had declared the Soviet occupation and annexation of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania during and after the Second World War to be illegal. Under pressure from the Wilson administration, Gorbachev reluctantly agreed to give the three socialist republics each referendums on independence. Each of the three, which had become the most restless of the Soviet constituent republics since the 1980s, voted to leave the union and were established as independent states on January 1, 1999. However, the loss of three republics was too much to bear for hardliners in the Soviet leadership and they deposed Gorbachev soon after, with Alexander Rutskoy, a former Soviet general and anti-reform Minister of Defence, being named the new General Secretary. Fears that Rutskoy would abrogate Gorbachev's agreements proved unfounded as the new Soviet leader quickly realized the futility of trying to rewind the clock and instead settled for keeping as much of the status quo as he could in place...

In Asia, the United States under Wilson increased its popularity. Evenhanded American dispute resolutions of both the Taiwan Strait Crisis and the establishment of relations with the government of Vietnam for the first time since South Vietnam's fall in 1977. Africa was a different story. The end of the Cold War had resulted in a rash of regimes, now without the stability brought about by either American or Soviet aid and support, collapsing in the face of popular unrest brought about by these regimes' corruption, brutality and favoritism at the expense of other ethnic groups. The countries that did not either fall or succumb to internecine struggles were soon flooded by refugees and occasionally fighting from neighboring states would spill over. The hallmark of this era was the collapse of Zaire following the death of its kleptocratic strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko, from prostate cancer in 1997. Almost immediately following Mobutu's death, the state fell apart into fighting, with Mobutu's family in the backdrop absconding with most of the country's wealth that the former leader had stolen during his long reign. By 1999, the horrific reports out of Zaire and the neighboring states of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda had stirred the United Nations to commission a peacekeeping force. The Wilson administration backed the creation of a force, believing that both the Soviet Union and America's allies in the UK, France and Germany would contribute a great deal of troops. This hope was quickly smashed, with only Great Britain, now freed of having to garrison Northern Ireland, contributed a substantial amount of soldiers to the project (France declined to send many soldiers, although not for lack of concern that Republican partisans said- its troops were already scattered across former French colonies in West Africa and in the Horn of Africa as part of other peacekeeping missions).

As a result, American soldiers made up a larger portion of the boots on the ground than the administration had anticipated, and despite private hopes of being able to persuade the PRC to provide troops in order to scale back US involvement, memories of successful involvement in Iran and the broad international and domestic support for military action resulted in the plan going ahead. As such, the United States took the lead when MINUSTAC (Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation au Congo) forces moved in to Zaire in the fall of 1999...

 

[lord caedus]

President Wilson had hoped that MINUSTAC would be a rallying point for his re-election campaign and something to which he could persuade Americans not to "change horses in midstream". But, things were not to go as planned. Diplomatic and logistical problems meant that MINUSTAC forces were unable to keep rebel militias and insurgencies from fading into the "bush" and the administration, wary of the sight of American soldiers combing through the jungle looking for enemy fighters bringing about comparisons with Vietnam, drastically undercut the ability of MINUSTAC field commanders to use American troops outside of occupation duty. As such, by summer 2000, the situation in the Congo had become one where the UN forces controlled major cities and nearby regions, while in remote provinces, the bloodbath that had brought UN troops there continued with only limited interruption.

In this environment, and owing to President Wilson being widely disliked among racial and ethnic minorities that made up quite a bit of the Democratic coalition, the Democrats' presidential field was full. Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri was best able to appeal to both union voters and the white working-class, although he was only able to become the front-runner after the withdrawal of Tennessee Senator Al Gore and the subsequent migration of Gore primary voters to him. Gephardt eventually won the nomination and decided to make history with the running mate selection, the second time in a row for the Democratic ticket, naming former Governor Ron Brown of New York to be his running mate, making Brown the first African-American on a major party ticket.

Wilson was able to rile up the conservatives in his party by portraying his agenda as being halted by "unelected, out-of-touch judges" in at the Supreme Court, and then revealed his major push for a second term: the revisiting of a free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico that had been abandoned following the election of President Huddleston in 1988. Gephardt immediately promised to fight such an agreement and rallied his union base, with Brown harshly criticizing Wilson for promoting policies that he said "were aimed at pandering to the worst impulses of white Americans".

President Wilson became the second Republican president in a row to lose his battle for re-election, largely on the back of his polarizing domestic policies and the perception that American and UN troops were not doing anything in the Congo other than risking American blood and treasure. With Hispanic and African-Americans turning out in record numbers for the Gephardt-Brown ticket (the latter of whom making history as the first black Vice President and the first VP with non-white ancestry since Charles Curtis), the Democrats picked up Florida and New Mexico, and thwarting Wilson's efforts to win his home state in his re-election bid, which, twisting the knife even more for Wilson, would have given him a second term had he won it.

 

[lord caedus]

...By 1991, voters were tired of the Conservatives, with the party having been in power for 16 years. Heseltine himself faced the unenviable position of trying to maintain a functioning government with Ulster Unionist support while his leadership rivals spent more time gathering support for an inevitable leadership election once the party lost power than focusing on the next general election, as internal polls had shown the Tories behind since the end of 1989.

Kinnock's stand against the Conservative proposals for local devolution in Scotland and Wales gave the Conservatives one lifeline out of a massacre and the party took it, polling surprisingly high in both Scotland and Wales even as their numbers dipped across the entire kingdom. As such, it was no surprise that the only gains the Conservatives made during the 1991 election were in those two regions.

Labour won a majority and despite the Democrats' overall vote share decreasing slightly, the third party won seats owing to the reduced Conservative vote share. Heseltine announced his resignation as Conservative leader the following day, having (quite correctly) realized he had no support within the party left after five years at the helm and the frontbench having long since decided he would leave after the election. Kinnock took office as the second Welsh prime minister, ironically being one of the fiercest opponents of a Welsh assembly in the new cabinet.

The new Labour government set about on an ambitious program: school and criminal sentencing reforms, renewed focus on pursuing peace in Northern Ireland, jump-starting work on the British side of the Channel Tunnel project (which had barely begun by the time Heseltine left office) and House of Lords reform. With a working majority of 20, Kinnock's government went to work, bringing British criminal laws in line with European Union standards, and getting the "Chunnel" finished just in time for the 1995 elections. Even more important was, with the mediation of American Secretary of State George Mitchell, the signing of the Belfast Agreement between the UK, Republic of Ireland, and almost all major parties for the loyalist and republican camps. The Agreement set out a comprehensive peace plan for Northern Ireland and ended violence except a few attacks by dead-end holdouts, the last of which occurred in 2002. A referendum, held the same day as the 1995 election, ratified the agreement by both Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic communities and after decades of conflict, peace returned to Northern Ireland.

The 1995 election result was a rerun of the 1991 results, with Conservative leader Norman Lamont failing to make headway against the government. David Penhaligon, the man who had brought the Democratic Party to new heights, retired afterwards, handing the party over to Scottish MP Charles Kennedy. The government then moved to reform the House of Lords, with the goal of making the second chamber entirely elected. This proved to be too much and Kinnock decided instead to implement gradual reforms, first stripping the right of hereditary peers to sit in the chamber. The hereditary peers (and some of the life peers) stood almost entirely in lockstep against this proposal, threatening to derail the reform. Another compromise was worked out, removing all but 100 hereditary peers instead, alongside limiting the ability of the prime minister to "pack" the Lords by setting limits on the amount of new peerages that could be created on a yearly basis.

The end of the Warsaw Pact and Bern Accords had a great impact on Britain, just like the rest of Europe. Eastern European immigrants, especially former East Germans, moved to Britain from their homelands, which began to cause a backlash, especially among working-class Britons who were the primary competitors of the new immigrants. Kinnock dismissed many of these concerns as lingering bigotries until poll numbers showed that the Conservatives, under new leader Michael Portillo, were making serious inroads into certain Labour constituencies after putting out an anti-Europe manifesto. Attempting to head off this threat, Kinnock came out for a so-called "immigration fee" for potential immigrants from former communist regimes, citing the "fiscal burden" imposed on Britons to accommodate poorer immigrants. This was an unmitigated disaster, with the government quickly backpedaling after the fee was called racist and opponents pointing out that, even if enacted it wouldn't work: former East Germans would still legally be able to move to Britain without such a burden as they were citizens of a fellow EU nation and could not be levied such a fee.

The immigration fee debacle and refusal of Kinnock to consider devolution to Scotland or Wales catalyzed enough Labour MPs to make an aborted challenge to Kinnock's leadership in 1998. The prime minister survived easily, but was shaken in the amount of his caucus and of the party members in general who had backed Ken Livingston, the left-wing stalking horse candidate who stood against him.

With Labour's poll numbers increasingly on shaky ground and with his backbench restless, Kinnock felt he had no choice but to call an early election in 1999 to prevent falling from power. A series of blunders by Portillo and his frontbench team resulted in both Labour and the Democrats staunching their respective bleeding with Labour abandoning its attempts at appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment by portraying the Conservatives as scapegoating minorities for problems that had resulted from Conservative misrule in the 1970s and 1980s and which Labour was working to fix.

As a result, Labour fell one seat short of a formal majority and lost the popular vote. Due to the abstentionist policies of Sinn Féin, however, Labour had an informal one-seat majority and Kinnock was able to remain prime minister, however he was significantly weakened. The prime minister was able to get parliament to agree to provide troops for the MINUSTAC mission in the Congo, but even this proved to be troublesome, as several embarrassing defections among left-wing members of the party (who viewed the endeavor as being a colonialist venture to gain access to the Congo's natural resources) and other foreign policy specialists (who foresaw the difficulties that would soon plague MINUSTAC from working as intended).

Kinnock, tired and under increasing strain dealing with a knife-thin majority, announced he would step down in 2000 upon the Labour Party electing his successor, after 15 years leading the party and leading Britain for nine....

 

[lord caedus]

...Following the 1988 election, the Liberals had been reduced to a minority government despite losing the national popular vote due to their overwhelming strength in Quebec, something that concerned Prime Minister MacEachan. His attempts to broaden the party's reach to appeal to westerners and Ontarians was quickly scuttled when the New Democrats elected Dave Barrett from British Columbia as their new leader, replacing longtime leader Ed Broadbent. Barrett had rejected calls from others in the party to attempt to break the Liberals' stranglehold of Quebec and instead focused on keeping the NDP as the main protest party of the western provinces.

Well short of a majority and with several of his cabinet ministers making plans to challenge his leadership, MacEachan called for an election in April 1990, hoping that Progressive Conservative leader John Crosbie's outspoken nature would give voters pause with putting the PCs back into power.

Despite the relatively small swing from the election, the large amounts of seats the Liberals had hung on to by thin margins flipped to the PCs in 1990, giving Crosbie the prime ministry and a majority of 18 seats. The appearance of the right-wing Reform Party in Alberta, which won 2 seats, was viewed with suspicion and Crosbie would attempt throughout the life of the parliament to make western conservatives feel at home in the party.

Crosbie's ascension to power had caused a resurgence of Francophone concern in Quebec owing to Crosbie's dismissive responses to his lack of knowledge of French and past opposition to official bilingualism. The Liberals, under new leader Jean Chrétien, attempted to turn this to their advantage, but Quebec leaders, seeing the attention that Reform had brought to the west, instead realized that the Liberals had begun to take Quebec for granted and Chrétien's own unpopularity in the province compounded this sentiment. Jacques Parizeau and other Parti Québécois party officials then gave their official blessing to the creation of the Union du Québec, a federal party that while not necessarily aiming for an independent Quebec, would advocate exclusively for Quebec's interests and seek to keep both provincial rights as well as the protections for the French language that had been won during the constitutional patriation.

Despite his own socially liberal actions (including privately ensuring that gay candidates would get a fair shake at PC nominating conventions, and having a record number of women in his cabinet), Crosbie's "politically incorrect" language became a severe liability as the 1994 campaign got underway. Several statements he had made, especially towards female Liberal MPs, had been viewed as patronizing, which cost the PCs among women voters. For his part, Chrétien's problems with several prominent Liberals (such as former Minister of Justice and now-Senator John Turner) who viewed him as an electoral liability and who continued to work to pick candidates more in the mold of his predecessor, MacEachan.

Reform and Union du Québec (UDQ) won two seats apiece, but their influence on the election was huge. Reform's presence caused several seats in Alberta and British Columbia to flip to the NDP while UDQ votes caused some Liberal seats to swing to the PCs. Chrétien's problems with some members of his party were revealed by post-election polling to be far less of a concern in voter's minds than Crosbie's controversial statements and, with an election expected to be held in 1996, Liberals were confident that even with Chrétien at the helm, the party would retake control.

Indeed, things seemed to be headed in that direction. Crosbie's popularity continued to fall unabated across many demographics: westerners, women, Francophones and urban Ontario, after he remarked that Canadians from Ottawa and Toronto were less well-liked in his native Newfoundland than Americans, not bothering to say he disagreed. Despite having a popular program among his caucus (including criminal justice reform, relaxing long arms gun control laws and introducing business tax breaks), Crosbie came under increasing pressure to resign, as evidence mounted that his unpopularity would sink the PC hopes for the next election.

The prime minister headed off talks of a leadership review by announcing in March 1995 that he would resign pending the election of his successor. The Progressive Conservatives were then handed a savior when Perrin Beatty, who had long been talked up as a potential PC leader, announced his candidacy and subsequently won. Beatty took over for Crosbie in January 1996, and spent the rest of the year prior to the election doing damage control, especially among female voters and westerners. The Liberals and NDP were content to let Beatty work overtime to prevent an electoral disaster and thus only seriously begun campaigning when a new election was announced for September. But soon, panic began to set in as internal polls showed that more and more voters were returning to the PC fold after the replacement of Crosbie and the Liberals and NDP could only watch as Beatty led his party to first place early on in the campaign and stayed there.

The results of the 1996 election were a shock to Canadians who, only two years earlier, had predicted that Reform and the UDQ had begun a process of regional breakdown and protest parties that would come to dominate Canada. Both minor parties lost their two seat caucuses and Reform leader Preston Manning would soon lose control over the party he had created during the next parliament. The New Democrats, however, were the biggest loser of the election, losing two-thirds of the entire caucus, including Barrett's own riding of Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca. Chrétien, despite his party making gains, would resign as well after being blamed by Liberals for doing little to stop Beatty's miraculous turnaround of PC fortunes.

With a majority, Beatty turned his attention to implementing his party's agenda. With the election of Pete Wilson in the United States later that year, Beatty had a friendly partner to the south and relations between the United States and Canada improved greatly since the frosty relations that had been the norm following the differences between the two countries were made apparent during the free trade debate in the 1980s. Beatty, even more so than Wilson, was receptive to business' arguments in favor of a free trade deal and pushed strongly for a deal with the United States and Mexico. Wilson, however, was in his first term and was planning to use a free trade agreement as part of his re-election campaign that he believed would force Congress to go allow it to go forward should he win.

Canada, in this spirit of great relations with the US, contributed troops to MINUSTAC, with its Francophone soldiers being godsends to the UN commanders on the ground in the Congo, and among the most popular of the "blue helmets" to the Congolese there. Beatty had planned to call an election in 2000 with internal polls showing a continued PC majority, but the explosive revelations of the De Bané Commission (named after the Liberal senator leading it) that showed massive amounts of corruption in the PC's highly-touted Canadian Business Partnership Initiative (CBPI) that sought to streamline government and business cooperation, including large amounts of "pay to play" used by both government ministers and civil servants attached to the program as well as a litany of other financial transgressions. The backlash was tremendous and Beatty had no choice but to delay calling for a new election...

 

[lord caedus]

...Pope Pius XIII's death in 1993 marked the end of the rule of Italian popes over the throne of St. Peter unbroken since the 16th century. The College of Cardinals, after fifteen years of a pope whose non-offensive and action-oriented philosophy, wanted a change of pace, feeling caught up in both the feeling that the Cold War was drawing to an end and also that the time had come for a non-Italian to wear the papal tiara for the first time in over 450 years.

The composition of the college had changed under Pius XIII in a more conservative direction, largely in a reaction to the liberalism of Pius' predecessor Paul VI and thus the only candidates who stood a chance were either theological moderates or conservatives. With no clear successor, the election took three days and it was only on the final ballot of the third day that a new pope was chosen and the election avoided having to be delayed for a day for reflection (much to the relief of the news media covering the conclave).

The Prefect of the Congregation of Faith Joseph Ratzinger of Germany was selected, a polar opposite to Pius. The church's enforcer of dogma and Vatican insider, Ratzinger, now called Benedict XVI, would be the face of the church into the new millennium, and become known as the pope who largely moved back from the reforms of Vatican II, leading the church in a more conservative direction as well as the pope who (fairly or not) was most associated with the break of the revelations of decades of sexual abuse by priests across the Catholic world....

 

[lord caedus]

...After decades of one-party rule, Mexico held its first free elections in decades in 1994, although suspicions were not ended by the narrow victory of incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Colosio's term was racked with some of the most difficult challenges Mexico had faced in decades: the conflict with Zapatista rebels in Chiapas that almost threatened to become a full-blown rebellion in the state, the economic crisis caused by decades of poor economic management that resulted in the peso's devaluation, and frosty relations with two consecutive American administrations over American proposals to that countries' immigration system that most Mexicans felt unfairly targeted their countrymen who had immigrated (legally or not) to the United States.

While the situation in Chiapas managed to resolve itself with a minimum of bloodshed, the economic slump continued until 2000 and Colosio was barely able to exercise the traditional PRI incumbent's prerogative in naming his successor as the PRI nominee, in this case, former Secretary of the Interior Emilio Chuayffet. Chuayffet faced former Guanajuato governor Vincente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and liberal Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro Cárdenas, one of Mexico's most beloved presidents of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Fox's charisma and frustration with PRI corruption, economic mismanagement and the perception that the PRI was willing to let the United States spite Mexico and its citizens with impunity led to the first opposition victory since the Mexican Revolution, the symbol of the start of a new democratic era in Mexico...

 

[lord caedus]

...Besides Albania, Yugoslavia was the only communist nation in Europe by the 1980s that was not a member of the Warsaw Pact. As such, the end of the threat of Soviet power was not an instant condition for the collapse of communism there, but it was the final condition that lead to the end of the communist monopoly on power in the multi-ethnic Balkan state.

...Following revolts in the republic of Croatia by liberal students in the early 1970s, President Tito set about preparing a new constitution that he felt could keep the six republics that made up Yugoslavia together. Decentralizing certain personal freedoms to the republics, Tito ignored calls for a rotation in office for the presidency (which would take place after his death, for he had been declared president-for-life) and instead planned for a system where his successors would be chosen from the heads of the republics and serve five-year terms, with the mandate that the president's home republic and that of his successor be different. This compromise satisfied enough of the ruling League of Communist leaders that they dutifully followed the constitutional process after Tito's death in 1980 and elected Petar Stambolić of Serbia to succeed him.

Stambolić's presidency (1980-1990) was crucial to the survival of the Yugoslav state. Stambolić moved quickly to react to both nationalistic appeals in the various republics and Western pressure to liberalize in reaction to the dysfunction and eventual death of the Warsaw Pact within his term in office, with US President Dole in particular pushing for Yugoslavia to be squeezed economically to hasten the end of communism there. Ruthlessly cracking down on nationalists that called for various ethnic state's independence, Stambolić's manipulation of the leaders of the party gained him a second term where the leaders who had agreed to Tito's 1974 constitution had felt assured that a five-year informal rotation had been promised.

With Dole's defeat in the 1988 election in the United States, Stambolić got his successor, President Huddleston, to agree to lift the economic sanctions Yugoslavia had received in return for democratization, with free elections to take place in 1992, with the delay being necessary for the transition away from a single-party state towards a democratic republic. When the ban on non-communist parties running in elections was repealed in 1990, the various republics began electing their own leaders.

In 1992, the promised constitutional amendments came into effect, transforming Yugoslavia into a parliamentary democracy. Patterned on the Australian "Washminster" system, the lower house National Assembly allocated deputies by population while the Federal Council granted each republic equal representation, partially as a check on the domination of the state by Serbia or Croatia, the largest two republics by population.

Ivan Stambolić, nephew of the former president, led the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia (SPJ), the successor to the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia, to victory on the basis of both his family name and trepidation on the part of many Yugoslav voters on the reliability of the other, untested candidates. Outgoing prime minister Ante Marković's Union of Reform (SR), the liberal alternative that the final Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) prime minister had founded while in office, lost spectacularly despite Western hopes that the reformist would succeed and continue his push towards quick privatization.

The other parties that made it above the five percent threshold were the Christian Democratic Union of Yugoslavia (HDUJ) as well as the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), both parties with religious tinges to their beliefs (HDUJ being nominally a Christian democratic party but operated as a broad-tent center-right to right-wing party while the SDA was a Muslim equivalent and thus only popular in Bosnia and Herzegovina). The Yugoslav People's Party (JLS), a right-wing party led by psychiatrist Radovan Karadžić, the final party to cross the threshold, advocated for the return of Serbian control of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo (which doubtlessly neither province nor the other republics would grant) and more centralization and a push for socially conservative rollbacks of holdover SFR laws regarding personal civil liberties.

Nevertheless, the democratic process had succeeded and the Stambolić government (a coalition between the SPJ and SR) took power with a multi-ethnic cabinet, setting the stage for Yugoslavia to cautiously move forward into the future and seek to be part of the larger European community...

 

[lord caedus]

President Gephardt began his term on a high note, enacting a national minimum wage increase and an increase in Medicare funding from Congress. He was also able, very early into his term, to appoint a new Supreme Court justice when Archibald Cox announced his retirement in 2001. Gephardt promoted former Solicitor General Walter E. Dellinger III of North Carolina to the bench, the first time a non-judge had been appointed since Cox joined the court 26 years previous.

Then he had to turn to foreign policy, having left the Congo to his cabinet while he concentrated on domestic policy while the iron was hot. Very little could be done until Gephardt and UN Secretary-Generals Boutros Boutros-Ghali and his successor, Amara Essy, succeeded both changing the operational parameters of the Congo Stabilization Force (CSF, MINUSTAC's military division) and enlisting the help of more African with peackeeping and occupation duty, freeing up Western soldiers to search for rebel holdouts, although this came with the drawback of increased American casualties and expenditures, which made the Congo effort even more unpopular.

The creation of the Internet in the early 1990s had led to an explosion of start-up companies and business ventures as businesses and consumers headed on-line alongside increasingly large numbers of Americans. With regulators struggling to regulate the new businesses and both the Republican-controlled House and President Wilson in favor of leaving the new medium with loose regulations, it came as no surprise to savvy financial analysts that in late 2001, the bubble burst as large quantities of start-ups that investors had thrown money at had made very little and some were being investigated for egregious fraud. The economy was further hurt when it became clear that the result of the Energy Freedom Act that President Wilson had pushed through was that private companies had bilked municipalities out of billions of dollars following the government incentivizing switching to private energy companies.

While President Gephardt and Congress quickly walked back energy deregulation as the executives of several large energy suppliers were brought to trial, the damage the "Internet bubble" had done had put the United States into a recession, with unemployment reaching 8 percent in early 2002. Efforts to shore up the economy quickly was not enough to prevent Congress from falling back into Republican hands, with the GOP sneaking into the majority with 51 seats.

The latter half of the presidential term started out rocky for Gephardt. The brutal repression of ethnic fighting in the Caucasus by the Soviet Union gave the West pause and the relationship with the Soviets cooled as a result. A hostile Congress prevented Gephardt from doing much in the way of domestic policy, although Republican leaders, consciously avoiding high-profile fights with the president that had characterized the last two years of the Huddleston Administration, managed to have cordial relations with Gephardt and a good working relationship developed between Gephardt and Speaker Dan Coats.

Mid-2003 saw an extraordinary turnaround for the Congo as the CSF's strategy of continual harassment and isolation of guerrilla bands saw almost all of them collapse by this time and the leaders came out of the jungle to take part in peace talks with Congolese officials, mediated by the UN and US State Department. The near-overnight change caught everyone outside of CSF command and the Defense Department off-guard and the withdrawal of almost all American troops by the subsequent December following the Kinshasa Agreement saw the president's approval ratings shoot up nearly twenty points from immediately prior to the end of hostilities.

The emergence of the issue of gay marriage and gay rights became an issue as well when, after the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same-sex marriage in Vigano v. Holder and state legislatures began to weigh in on the issue. While the president came out in favor of civil unions instead of full same-sex marriage, he listened to the advise of his aides and did not push the issue as it drew close to 2004.

 

[lord caedus]

For most of the three years following the loss of the White House to the Democrats, the Republican front-runner had been former Vice President Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. Wilson's vice president, despite proving himself as an able vice president and governor, was viewed as a dull moderate who could not inspire voters to ditch a president who had strong approval ratings following the turnaround, and subsequent victory, in the Congo. That's when a challenger appeared.

Former First Lady Elizabeth Dole had become a senator for her home state of North Carolina during the same election that had brought Pete Wilson to the White House and had emerged as one of the most popular Republicans in the country. When Dole announced her candidacy, it quickly turned the race from an Alexander coronation into a slugfest between the two lead candidates. Alexander's strengths of having executive experience and being able to appeal to moderates was blunted by Dole's ability to appeal to appeal to both moderates and conservatives while also making inroads with female voters, a huge priority for the GOP. The campaign soon devolved into vicious mud-slinging as Super Tuesday provided no clear winner. The absence of former President Dole (who was 80 years old when his wife began campaigning) from much of the campaign trail led to nasty rumors of marital trouble between the former first couple and the Dole campaign retaliated by drawing attention to shady real estate deals Alexander may have been involved in during the gap between his service as Tennessee governor and selection by Wilson for the vice-presidential spot.

Dole finally came out on top in April after swinging around to Alexander's right, with the former VP suspending his campaign and endorsing the former First Lady, making Dole the first ever female presidential nominee of a major party. To reassure moderates and independent voters as well as provide a direct contrast to the Democratic campaign, Dole selected South Dakota Senator Larry Pressler, whose reputation for integrity and pragmatism were unmatched, as her running mate.

President Gephardt, as expected, won his party's nomination uncontested except by a few perennial candidates and cranks. Vice President Brown had by this time become a liability to the campaign after damning news broke of improper deals and finance irregularities from when Brown was New York's governor. Although debate raged within the Gephardt campaign on whether to keep the embattled VP, Gephardt made the decision to drop him from the ticket, the first time since 1944 that a sitting vice president had been denied renomination on his party's ticket. Gephardt selected former North Carolina governor Jim Hunt as his new running mate and, as a gesture of loyalty to Brown, publicly refused the suggestion that he ask Brown to resign (which constitutional lawyers pointed out, Brown, alone out of all cabinet members, could refuse when asked by the president).

Dole's selection of a moderate, even one as well-liked as Pressler, led conservatives in her party concerned and she defied conventional expectations and did not move to the center post-convention in order to prevent conservatives from voting third-party or sitting home. Hitting the president for corruption and blaming him for the Internet bubble, Dole squandered any gains the GOP had in the Hispanic community by saying she would continue Wilson's legacy, including a revisited push against illegal immigration and undocumented workers within the United States. Gephardt struck back, pointing to the success in the Congo, the economic turnaround and bashed Dole for what he called "punitive measures" against illegal immigrants.

Gephardt held a small lead throughout the campaign after the replacement of Brown, and the Dole's campaign all but ensured that the president would win reelection as a result of one of the infamous "Rainbow" advertisement. The ad, which showed Gephardt receiving the endorsement of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, attempted to play on anti-gay and anti-transgender prejudices to smear the Democratic campaign. The fierce backlash that resulted caused the campaign to pull the ad and fire its media director but the damage had already been done.

The twin damages caused by the Rainbow ad and the Dole campaign's support of harsh measures against illegal immigrants within the United States led to a Gephardt electoral college blowout and a comfortable win in the popular vote. Hispanic votes for Gephardt, as a response to a second straight Republican campaign pushing for strict measures against illegal immigrants, swung Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona (which had not voted Democratic since 1948) to the Democrats, leaving only Colorado (where strong campaigning by Pressler towards the end of the race narrowly averted a Democratic win) and ruby-red Texas as the only states with a sizable Hispanic population not to fall into the Democratic column. The presence of small right-wing third parties on the ballot also gave Gephardt a surprise victory in Arkansas. The House also just went back to Democratic control, but President Gephardt's coattails, were not long enough to swing the Senate and indeed the party actually lost a seat overall as a result of retirement of open seats formerly held by conservative Democrats in the south.

 

[lord caedus]

It would be under President Gephardt that the tenuous peace that had, by and large, held in the Middle East for the better part of two decades finally collapsed and the region again became a by-word in Washington for intractable problems and internecine violence. The death of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat caused a vacuum in the Palestinian leadership that allowed disaffected members, tired of their old leader's reliance on talks to advance their cause, to splinter away and begin an armed campaign against Israel, known later as the Palestinian Intifada. The Iraqi regime nearly collapsed over night when President Saddam Hussein fell into a coma after suffering a massive stroke. Hussein's second son and heir apparent Qusay briefly succeeded to the role of president, but disaffection with the Sunni regime and the economic mismanagement of the Hussein years led to a Shi'ite uprising, aided with barely-concealed support from neighboring Shia-majority Iran.

Split control of Congress had shut the door on the president's planned initiative to legalize a "card check" system to make it easier to organize workers into unions, but did not prevent him from acting on illegal immigration. The Immigration Reform Act of 2006, passed on bipartisan lines, instituted a system of special status for adults who had illegally immigrated to the United States (while denying them the possibility that they could achieve citizenship except in some circumstances) while making children who had been brought to the United States illegally into resident aliens and eligible for citizenship at age 21. The act, while lauded by immigration reform advocates, was only effective for immigrants who came before January 1, 2002 and had not committed crimes in the United States (other than illegal immigration) or their home countries and not made into a permanent program.

Poor candidate choices by the Republicans mixed with inopportune retirements in vulnerable seats led to the Democrats bucking the trend and picking up two Senate seats in off-year elections— enough for the party to win control of the upper chamber. The House, however, kept with the usual trend of the president's party losing seats in the midterms and was taken by the Republicans, making the midterms the first time in US history that both houses of Congress had flipped control—to different parties.

With only two years left on his term, Gephardt decided to push his luck and try for comprehensive energy reform. The United States energy and power system by this time had become woefully inadequate and relied (more than most other advanced countries) on environmentally harmful substances like oil and coal. Spearheaded by Tennessee Senator Al Gore, the administration passed an ambitious bill that restructure America's power grid and begin a shift towards renewable fuel sources such as solar energy or biodiesel. Despite several moderate Republicans crossing over in support, the bill failed due to the revolt of Democrats from oil and coal-producing states, led by former Vice President Robert Byrd (who had returned to the Senate in 1984), an embarrassing defeat for the president. Legislation was eventually passed successfully to upgrade the United States' power grid, but by this time media attention had been drawn to the presidential race to succeed Gephardt.

President Gephardt got to make his second and final Supreme Court nomination when Justice Griffin Bell retired in 2007. The president selected Second Court of Appeals Justice Sonia Sotomayor of New York, making her the first Hispanic justice on the Court (or the first unquestionably Hispanic justice, following Benjamin Cardozo).

 

[lord caedus]

Leading up to the 2008 election, a cautious optimism held on the Democratic side that the party could win a third consecutive term in the White House for the first time since the election of Hubert Humphrey forty years earlier. Vice President Hunt, who would be 71 when the next president was inaugurated, declined to run, leaving the race wide open. The top tier of candidates included Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, former Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo. Wellstone, the darling of the liberal activist wing, was handicapped by both his "unpresidential" appearance and his poor health, having been privately diagnosed with multiple sclerosis six years ago. Gore quickly vacuumed up soft Wellstone supporters as a result of his public fight for the president's environmental legislation. With Wellstone withdrawing in late January, Gore, despite being very close to both Cuomo and Manchin on most issues outside of the environment, emerged as the strongest candidate. He wrapped up the nomination by March and selected Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy and member of the Kennedy clan, as his running mate.

The Republican side was similarly divided. The presumptive front runner, 2004 vice presidential nominee Larry Pressler, declined to run and thus the gates were opened for a bevy of candidates, including Arizona Senator John McCain, Alabama Governor Robert Riley, Maryland Senator Michael Steele, New York Congressman Bill Paxon, Ohio Senator Mike DeWine and Texas Congresswoman Kay Bailey. Steele, a black freshman senator with less than five years' experience in top-tier politics, was quickly dismissed and dropped out, although he did make history as the first serious black presidential candidate for the Republicans. Paxon and DeWine split the northern moderate vote, leading to their eventual fall into the second tier and Bailey's bid was handicapped by questions of sweet-heart real estate deals some of her friends had received, leading to her withdrawal in late January. The race then became between McCain and Riley and became an almost surreal display: McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, and long-time senator ran as an iconoclastic reformer while Riley, son of a rancher who fought to reform his state's regressive tax system as governor, ran as the candidate of establishment Republicans. While McCain polled higher with independents, the party faithful by and large went with Riley, making the Alabama governor the party's nominee. Riley, the first Republican nominee from the Deep South in the party's history, chose Delaware Congressman and former governor Mike Castle as his running mate, an unorthodox choice that confounded the media covering the race.

After the primaries were over, Gore's campaign strategy, namely moving away from the president, proved to be a poor one. Gephardt still had moderately high approval ratings with most Americans but not demanding Vice President Brown's resignation and minor scandals that came to light during his second term fueled perceptions inside Washington that the president was viewed as corrupt. This was doubly not helped by Gore selecting Kennedy; while the congressman was an accomplished legislator and had a famous family name, the press latched on to Kennedy's previous support of the the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, something antithetical to the views and laws of both the US government and that of its close ally, Great Britain, which labeled the Provisional IRA as a terrorist group.

The Riley campaign, while hitting Gore hard on his support for environmental legislation that he claimed would cost jobs in oil and coal-producing states, also pushed his proposal for tax breaks for both low-income earners and businesses while increasing the tax rates on high-income individuals. The unusual sight of a Republican presidential nominee publicly committing himself to raising taxes on the rich turned heads and gave Riley a huge media and popularity boost.

Gore never recovered from the miscues and Riley won the election by a safe margin. He became the first president from the Deep South since Zachary Taylor in 1848 and the first Alabaman elected to the presidency. The Republicans, although picking up Gore's Senate seat (which he declined to run for again to focus entirely on the presidential race), failed to win control of the Senate, evening losing a few Senate races due to having vulnerable incumbents in Democratic-trending states. The House, on the other hand, increased its Republican majority.

 

[lord caedus]

...Kinnock would hand the reins off to his successor as Labour leader, Gordon Brown. Brown faced a difficult situation, with voter fatigue with Labour as well as dissatisfaction with Kinnock's strong stand against devolution costing the party Scottish and Welsh support and the Conservatives under Michael Portillo pounding the government on Britain's support for the American-led mission in the Congo. Faced with the same perceived lack of a mandate that his predecessor had, Brown called for elections in the summer of 2001.

Portillo hit the prime minister hard and Brown seemed largely unable to reverse the downwards trajectory Labour had been on when he inherited the leadership. His reversal on Kinnock's position of devolution prevented a complete Labour wipe-out in Scotland and Wales, but even he was amazed at the result once the counting finished late post-election morning.

The 2001 results came about as the result of separate factors that seemingly conspired to prevent a Tory majority. First, the constituency boundaries had been redrawn in what opponents called a "natural Labour gerrymander" that gave the governing party a built-in advantage. Second, the Democratic Party, acting as a spoiler, served as a protest party for Conservative-leaning voters who felt that Portillo was too hard-line for the prime minister's office, giving Labour plenty of seats that normally would have been out of their reach. Finally, there was the aforementioned factor of Portillo himself. The young Tory leader was enormously popular within his party but his proposed program of deregulation, tax cuts and spending cuts primarily on public aid programs, had resulted in a fierce media backlash and given Brown and Democratic Party leader Charles Kennedy a lifeline that both men grasped with both hands.

The Democrats controlled the balance of power and immediately, Portillo and Brown both tried to gain their favor. The constitutional convention was that Brown, as the incumbent prime minister, be given first chance to form a government, but Portillo immediately protested, pointing out that the Conservatives had won more seats and won by far a larger portion of the popular vote. The ensuing brouhaha, as later recounted by both Buckingham Palace officials and several civil service lawyers, immediately caused fear of a constitutional crisis developing. But that was cut short when Kennedy led the Democrats into a coalition with Labour within two days of the election, keeping Brown as prime minister.

Kennedy's conditions were high and Brown had to relinquish several key portfolios, such as education and transport, to Democratic ministers and also agreed to bring up electoral reform. Brown's enactment of devolution for Scotland and Wales was arguably the highlight of his term, and his party gained a small bump from the turnaround in the Congo to make unexpected gains in the European Union elections in 2004 as well. Brown and Labour, both knowing that a switch from first-past-the-post (FPTP) would hurt Labour, technically fulfilled their coalition agreement by passing an act that would given Britons a chance to vote whether to change their voting system to the single transferable vote (STV) (which the Democrats preferred) or keep FPTP. Labour then subsequently sat on its hands while the Conservatives (ironically for a party who had recently lost two elections despite winning the popular vote in both) campaigned furiously, and in some cases dishonestly, against STV, and voters ended up rejecting it by a 2:1 margin.

Portillo had resigned as Conservative leader in the light of his party's poor showing in the 2004 European elections and was replaced by William Hague. Hague's skills at debate and his ideological placement in the center of the Conservative Party drove the final nails into Brown's hopes for a second full term. A final bit of coalition drama ensued when Kennedy resigned from both the Democratic leadership and the cabinet in late December, checking into rehab for alcoholism. Amid press speculation and gossiping if Kennedy had been "drunk at the wheel" while helping to run the government, the Democrats replaced him with Malcolm Bruce in time for the election.

To no one's surprise, the Conservatives won a crushing victory, getting a majority of over 50 seats and almost winning as much of the popular vote Labour and the Democrats combined. Brown resigned as Labour leader that night, signalling the end of Labour's 15 years in control of Great Britain.

Hague's term in office would be one of rebuilding and restructuring as the Conservatives began the restructuring of the British armed services, following both the end of the Troubles and the Congo War, emphasizing making the military more mobile rather than an occupation-type force that had been used in both Northern Ireland and the Congo. The army reforms, alongside the raising of tuition fees, and ending of several tax breaks which were used primarily by lower- and middle-income taxpayers to help pay for both the reforms and equalize the deficit increases that Britain's involvement in the Congo had brought led to protests that the military was being funded at the expense of the students and Hague was forced to return tuition fees to the previous level before the 2010 election to head off student anger.

The selection of Joseph Kennedy II as the Democratic vice presidential nominee in the 2008 United States presidential race caused outrage in Britain, as Kennedy had previously voiced support for the IRA during the Troubles. Hague's blistering dismissal of Kennedy as "wearing rose-tinted glasses with plastic green frames" resulted in very friendly relations between Downing Street and the Riley White House following the election.

Gordon Brown's unexpected successor as Labour leader was left-winger Jon Cruddas, who worked to chip down Hague's impressive lead in the polls before the writs were dropped in 2010. Cruddas' push, however, was hindered by push for effective policy rather than what was politically popular at that moment, allowing Hague to avoid getting into what Conservative leaders privately feared would be costly debates. Scottish voters were also receptive to the Scottish National Party (SNP) without Brown, who had granted devolution, leading Scotland and Labour saw several attainable seats either taken by the SNP or taken by the Conservatives or Democrats when the SNP acted as spoilers. Hague, meanwhile, was forced to deal with the rise of the National Party, led by former cabinet minister John Redwood, that ran as an anti-Europe right-wing populist party.

Hague won a very slim majority of two seats (effectively seven including abstentionist Sinn Féin MPs) with the Nationals taking almost five percent of the vote, most of which almost certainly would have went to the Conservatives otherwise. Cruddas, despite helping his party pick up 50 seats from the previous election, opted to resign as leader following the election, with some saying he privately welcomed the excuse of failing to get rid of Hague to justify leaving a position he disliked...

 

[lord caedus]

...The effect of the CPBI scandal was tremendous, and the Liberals, now under the leadership of John Manley, hammered the Progressive Conservatives relentlessly over the government's flagship program being riddled with corruption. The results of the 2001 election were therefore a surprise to no one, with the run-up to the election only focusing on just how large the Liberal majority would be.

Manley took office with a strong majority of 27 seats, picking up over 60 seats compared to 1996. The Liberal leader's right-leaning tilt, including his support for a potential free trade agreement with the United States and Mexico, resulted in an increased turnout for the Union du Québec, and the party returned to parliament, picking up two seats as the party campaigned as Quebec's left-center alternative to the Liberals. The NDP, under new leader Lorne Nystrom, also made gains at the expense of the PCs, despite the right-wing vote on the prairies no longer being split owing to the effective end of the Reform Party.

The Liberals, despite their embrace of free trade under Manley, at the same time worked for aims that would not have been out of place in the previous Liberal governments of Trudeau and MacEachan. The Liberals increased funding for education (awarding larger amounts for funding technical programs), increased funds for First Nation reserves and made progress towards subsidized child care. The relations between the United States and Canada continued to be close, especially with both countries involved in the effort to stabilize the nation formerly known as Zaire.

Beatty had resigned as the leader of the Progressive Conservatives following the loss in 2001 and was replaced by the most right-wing PC leader since Jack Horner: former Minister for Finance Mike Harris of Ontario. The Progressive Conservatives' program shifted alongside their selection of leaders, coming out for slashing taxes and government spending, with Harris becoming a dogged critic of what he characterized as wasteful government spending. UDQ leader Bernard Landry also left during the life of the parliament, being replaced by Pauline Marois. Marois, despite her independentist sympathies, was able to recruit non-independentists into the UDQ coalition for the first time during the first years of the Manley ministry, exploiting Quebecer mistrust of the prime minister and arguing that Quebec had been taken for granted by the Liberals and thus short-changed when it came to federal funds and programs.

The Liberals kept their majority, but had it slimmed down to 10 accounting for the expansion of parliament and redistricting. The NDP lost over a third of its pre-election caucus, mostly to PC gains in the prairies (where Harris was especially popular). But the major story was the UDQ flipping 15 seats from the Liberals, and overtaking the NDP for the third-biggest party in parliament. Nystrom took the blame for the result and resigned soon after, being replaced by Saskatchewan premier Lorne Calvert.

Having satisfied the Liberals' center-left constituencies, Manley attempted to take the wind out of Harris' sails by pushing for a deficit-reduction plan, funded in part by raising taxes and slashing both the military budget (following most Canadian troops leaving the Congo in 2004), and slashing aid to the provinces across the board except for Medicare and education funding. Quebec proved to be an irritant in Manley's side as he begun clashing with his Quebec ministers who warned him that such moves, while popular in Ontario and the west, had hurt the Liberal brand even more in Quebec. Several half-hearted attempts to rebuild "Fortress Quebec", such as the attempt to mandate a certain percentage of Francophone ministers in the cabinet (which was blocked by a coalition of PCs and independents affiliated with the NDP in the Senate), did little to ease Quebec's dislike of the direction the Liberals were moving under Manley.

By the time Manley had decided to advise outgoing Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson to dissolve parliament for new elections, Harris had unveiled the Progressive Conservatives' ambitious program to slash public sector expenditures and, with a liberal application of tax breaks and tax credits, stimulate the private sector to create a net gain of thousands of jobs. The plan almost immediately came under fire, as Manley and Calvert pounced on the mathematical errors and assumptions in the PC plan. Harris' refusal to abandon the plan for most of the campaign dragged down the Progressive Conservatives as the other federal parties slammed the PC plan as being emblematic of a party too right-wing to responsibly govern Canada.

The Progressive Conservatives lost over 30 seats with all three other major federal parties making gains, making Manley the first prime minister to lead his party to three successive majorities since William Lyon Mackenzie King. The NDP regained over a dozen seats, all in the west at the expense of the PCs. The Liberals won 22 seats, mostly in Ontario, at the expense of the PCs- one more than they lost to the UDQ in Quebec, which made 2009 the first election since 1887 where the Liberals did not win at least a plurality of Quebec's seats. The upstart Green Party lost its only MP as party-switcher Blair Wilson lost his bid for reelection under the Green banner, although the party broke five percent of the popular vote for the first time. Harris himself barely won reelection to his own riding and resigned as PC leader when the scale of the PC defeat became known....

 

[lord caedus]

...President Vincente Fox, Mexico's first non-PRI president in over 80 years, entered office with some of the highest approval ratings in Mexican history and a sweeping mandate for change. However, Mexicans could not agree on what change precisely was needed and thus Fox and his administration wound up curtailing the president's efforts to institute a value-added tax to raise revenue, something Fox had planned to be the centerpiece of his effort at fiscal reform. Nevertheless, Fox's attempts to make Mexico a leader in Central America by signing free-trade agreements with both Belize and Guatemala and attempting to jump-start talks on a possible Americas-wide (sans Cuba) free trade area ran into opposition both from the United States and leftist governments in Venezuela and Uruguay, effectively ending the agreement for the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, the United States' tackling of the problem of (primarily Mexican) illegal immigration in the final months leading up to the election and the lack of an economic downturn under Fox led to Fox being able to effectively appoint his successor as PAN's presidential candidate, former Secretary of the Interior Santiago Creel. Creel's primary opposition came from PRD candidate and former Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known affectionately as "AMLO", who campaigned as a left-wing alternative to Creel and criticized Fox's administration for its pro-business tilt and what he described as its "submissive" relationship with the United States during Fox's term. The PRI nominated former Tlaxcala Governor Beatriz Paredes after a surprise primary victory saw Paredes triumph over ex-Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo. Paredes became the first major-party female presidential nominee in Mexican history and her placement on the PRI's left-wing meant that she ended up taking votes away from López Obrador.

Creel won a small victory, largely owing to Paredes acting as a spoiler for López Obrador, and pledged to accelerate the slow growth to the Mexican economy that had taken place under Fox...

 

[lord caedus]

...Following the intervention by UNSFFI and expulsion of Iraqi troops from Khuzestan, a stable, unified Iranian government emerged for the first time since the fall of the Shah less than five years earlier. Although fighting continued intermittently even after the arrival of UN troops, by and large the disparate factions (followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Shah dead-enders, liberals, nationalists, and ethnic minorities) put down their weapons and begun the process of forming a unity provisional government under UN supervision. The constitutional convention to create a new government eventually settled under a semi-presidential system similar to that of France, and the first elections were held in 1985...

President Rafsanjani, who had become the first Islamic Republican to win the presidency in 2000, was by the time the 2005 elections came around, very unpopular. Despite being a moderate Islamic Republican Party (IRP) member, Rafsanjani had an extremely poor relationship with the Majlis (Iran's parliament) and his government had come under harsh criticism both for the discovery and execution of several Iranian spies within Iraq and for corruption as scandals begun to pile up. Rafsanjani fended off potential challengers to be the IRP candidate, opposing former Army General and decorated war veteran Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (candidate of the nationalists) and Majlis member and son of former prime minister Mehdi Bazargan (candidate of the liberals).

As an incumbent president, Rafsanjani was expected to take either first or second place in the first round and face either Ghalibaf or Bazargan in the runoff, but the candidacy of popular Islamist mayor of Tehran Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, combined with Rafsanjani being battered for corruption, led to a shocking third-place finish in the first round for the president, with Ghalibaf and Bazargan advancing to the second round.

Ghalibaf held the advantage throughout the second round, as Rafsanjani and Ahmedinejad voters quickly moved to support him over Bazargan, who struggled to gain votes outside of those of Iran's ethnic minorities who had been the liberals' traditional allies against the nationalist and Islamist parties. Bazargan's campaign attempted to tar Ghalibaf with the brush of scandal over army misappropriations that the Majlis had investigated during Ghalibaf's service, but the former general had only been tangentially involved and the attack failed to gain traction in the two weeks before the second round.

Ghalibaf won a comfortable victory, and became the first Iranian president who had seen frontline combat during both the Iranian Civil War and the Persian Gulf War against Iraq. This would have consequences when Iraq would dissolve into chaos following Saddam Hussein's fall into a coma the next year and the Ghalibaf administration's barely-concealed support of Shi'ite rebels within Iraq...

 

[lord caedus]

...President Riley would be the first Republican president arguably since Theodore Roosevelt who became noted for his economic program when he began pushing for what became known as the "New Covenant". At the heart of the New Covenant was the tax plan that the president had outlined in the 2008 campaign: income tax rates on the lower class and business would be lowered while those on the high-income tax bracket would pay more. The New Covenant's tax philosophy was able to pass through the divided Congress with relatively few changes from Riley's initial proposal, with both parties being able to overlook the parts of the bill they disagreed as a result of the parts they did like.

The second stage of the New Covenant did not fare nearly as well. The president proposed a balanced budget amendment that would require cuts to be made to most non-defense agencies in order to meet with his requirements. While this passed the House with a narrow majority, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted the balanced budget amendment down. Riley, undeterred, tried again in 2010 before the midterms and had a similar result.

President Riley would be the first Republican president since George Bush nearly thirty years before to be able to appoint new justices to the Supreme Court. Shirley Hufstedler opted to retire in 2009 after 38 years on the court, and Riley replaced her with Fourth District Court of Appeals Justice Maureen Mahoney of Virginia. In 2010, John Paul Stevens, the only other Republican appointee besides Mahoney on the court, decided to retire as well. Riley replaced him with Eighth District Court of Appeals Justice Steven Colloton of Iowa.

The midterms saw the Republicans lose seats but retain control of the House while the Democrats lost seats in the Senate but similarly retained control. President Riley agreed with his advisers' assessment that the political situation in Congress had not changed enough to push for the balanced budget amendment for a third time, so he moved on to another plank of the New Covenant. Taking a page from Canadian Prime Minister John Manley, Riley pushed for greater emphasis on technology and science in high schools and colleges. While the high school portion was scrapped in congressional negotiations, the Innovation in Education Act of 2011 has resulted in the a large number of technical and vocational colleges expanding and the American manufacturing and technology sector boom that has continued for the past five years...

On the foreign policy front, President Riley inherited Gephardt's headaches about the Middle East. The replacement of the Hussein regime by a Shi'ite government which looked to Iran and President Ghalibaf had destabilized the balance of power in the region and Secretary of State Zoellick spent a large part of his tenure attempting to calm down Saudi, Jordanian and Turkish concerns about Iranian aggression while negotiating with a difficult supposed ally in President Ghalibaf of Iran.

The Palestinian Intifada claimed a great propaganda victory when recently retired Israeli General Yoni Netanyahu was killed in a mortar attack in late 2009. The death of Netanyahu, who was one of Israel's greatest war heroes and most beloved citizens, enraged the Israeli population and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soon launched Operation Righteous, a counter-insurgency military operation against Palestinian fighters. The harsh methods used by the IDF in Operation Righteous, including abetting officers who authorized torture of Palestinian prisoners and with little concern given to collateral damage when ordering bombing strikes, led to the international community switching from sympathizing with Israel for the shocking loss of a national icon to turning against them. President Riley, despite his support of Israel, condemned what he called an "extreme overreaction by the State of Israel". The victory of a right-wing coalition largely fueled by Israeli grievance with what they viewed as abandonment by their American allies and push to crush the intifada kept American and Israeli relations at their lowest point in history by the time the president came up for re-election...