I'm sure a popular what if scenario ITTL would be what if Jimmy Carter stayed Vice President.
The President Lay Dying: A TLIAW
- Thread starter Vidal
- Start date
He's boxed himself in a bit there. He needs to protect his Southern Flank, but also, well a Southerner isn't going to help with anyone of his left.
January 20, 1993
EPILOGUE
January 20, 1993
January 20, 1993
The president-elect’s motorcade entered the White House gates, his car coming to a stop in front of the White House Portico. The Doles stood in front of the door, smiling at the new president and his wife. These same couples would meet under similar circumstances eight years to the day. For now, though, they knew not what the future held. They knew only that the president-elect had finally done it. It was a goal that began decades earlier, in the lead-up to that nearly-successful campaign for the Democratic nomination. It was a moment that should have come in October 1977, when the 39th President of the United States succumbed to his battle with cancer. But now, on January 20, 1993, a very different Jimmy Carter prepared to assume the presidency.
He flashed a grin as he stepped out of the vehicle. He shook Bob Dole’s hand and kissed Liddy Dole’s cheek. Finally, he sighed to himself. He was here.
When he first ran for the White House in 1976, he was a one-term Southern governor. He’d been heralded as an example of the “New South.” He had nearly won that race, but the powers that be conspired against him. His place as Humphrey’s successor had been usurped. He had planned a 1980 campaign, but it was Rosalynn — the always thoughtful and always calming presence — who had quelled his range. It was she who talked him into the Senate campaign., and he’d come back to Washington as a member of the world’s greatest deliberative body. Many thought he’d run in ’84 or ’88, but Carter bided his time. He read the tea leaves. Ham Jordan, always by his side, knew the numbers. He knew the way the wind was blowing. And he knew that it was not yet time for Carter.
As the sun began to set on Bob Dole’s presidency, almost everyone assumed that Jimmy Carter would become the 42nd President of the United States. He had become the new prohibitive front runner, assuming the mantle held by Ted Kennedy through decades of presidential speculation. Jimmy Who? they had asked in 1976. By 1991, they were asking, Jimmy When?
The Doles and the Carters walked through the double doors. Liddy and Rosalynn broke off for a look at the White House Residence and some of the other state rooms. Bob and Jimmy headed for the Oval Office. In truth, despite the fact that Carter represented the Democratic Party, Bob Dole didn’t mind that Carter would be his successor. He viewed Carter as one of the most responsible Democrats on the Hill. Carter wasn’t about any of that free spending liberal nonsense. Not the way Bob Dole saw it. Jimmy Carter was a different kind of Democrat, and though he’d drifted to the left since entering the Senate, Bob Dole still trusted him to be a capable steward of the ship of state.
The outgoing and incoming president stood in the door frame of the Oval Office before taking a seat on the couches. Carter looked over at the bare desk that would soon be his, and Dole told him there’d be a letter waiting upon his return to the office later that day.
There was some awkward small talk and Dole promised to be a resource for Carter should he need it. “Don’t be afraid to call,” he’d said. Carter politely nodded. He did not envision needing his successor’s help, but it was a small club — the men who held this office — and there was no living ex-Democrat president to provide Carter with their thoughts. Not that he would have called Scoop Jackson for anything.
During the ride to the Capitol Building, Dole looked out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Good crowd,” he offered.
“It’s the people’s day,” Carter said. Bob Dole just kind of smiled at that one. Jimmy Carter. Always a prick. But what the 41st president missed was that Jimmy Carter — after all these years, after all the trials and tribulations he’d faced on his way to the White House — earnestly believed it. It was not his day. It was certainly not a day for the Washington establishment — for the people who had, for years, conspired to keep him from the office. No, it was not their day. It was the people’s day. The people had elected him president.
By the time Jimmy Carter walked the entire length of Pennsylvania Avenue back to the White House, former President Bob Dole was on Air Force One. He and Liddy were on their way back for a few days in Kansas before they had to return to Washington. Senator Elizabeth Dole had work to do yet.
• • •
Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address set the tone for his new administration. He would enjoy eight years of relative prosperity in the White House. The economy was in strong shape. He was assuming a balanced budget — in fact, the government had enjoyed a balanced budget for nearly all of Bob Dole’s second term. Carter would do nothing in his eight years to disrupt it, leaving many historians and pundits to laud the ushering in of a new post-partisan era.
Even Carter’s attempts at monumental reforms proved successful. In his first 100 days, Carter moved on universal healthcare reform. He had talked about it throughout the campaign, and he brought in his former Senate colleagues to help draft the legislation. Chairmen Ted Kennedy of HELP and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of Finance practically lived at the White House. Even Dan Rostenkowski, the fiercely protective Ways and Means Chairman in the House, played a key role in drafting the bill. Carter’s personal desires mirrored those of Kennedy, but when it became clear that the votes were not there, Carter gradually brought Kennedy along, letting him mark up his own bill and come to certain realizations on his own time. When Rhode Island Senator John Chafee approached him about a Republican compromise, he and Kennedy traveled to Camp David for a long and restorative sojourn. Carter made the case that a bipartisan healthcare bill could ensure its success, even if it was not what they wanted — even if it meant a slower path to universal coverage.
For twelve years, Carter had made friends on Capitol Hill. He did not set out to do so. He entered the Senate with the same distrust of Washington elites that he had carried throughout his 1976 presidential campaign. Of course he was jaded. These were the people who used him to hold the South in ’76 and then chased him out of the vice presidency when his time came. He did not trust these people.
But Carter did not believe in sitting in the Senate while his desk collected dust. He wanted to move legislation through, and that was only possible with the help of his colleagues. Gradually, Jimmy Carter learned how a bill became a law — not the Schoolhouse Rock way but the real way. He pushed legislation preserving land in Alaska over the objections of Alaska’s own delegation, but when the bill took on momentum, Carter and his Alaskan colleague, Ted Stevens, sat in a room and hammered out a compromise that won broad bipartisan support and balanced the state’s desires to earn revenue from its oil and preserve the environment. The Carter-Stevens bill was one of the most monumental pieces of environmental legislation in American history. Carter had only been in office two full years when President Jackson signed it into law.
So, the 42nd president was not the same man he would have been had he become the 39th or 40th. He was more skilled, more refined, and he understood Washington. It was how, less than a year into his presidency, he was able to sit at a small desk in front of the White House and sign the Patient Protection and Access to Care Act. With a grin, he turned and gave a pen to Ted Kennedy and John Chafee. They had done it.
As if catching the great white whale of Democratic politics was not enough, Jimmy Carter negotiated peace in the Middle East, finally bringing Israel and the PLO together. He brought Rabin and Arafat to Camp David, and the Camp David Accords ushered in a new hope for peace in the Middle East. Nothing ever came so easy, but Carter, who had grown into the role of the Commander-in-Chief, put pressure on Israel to abide by its commitments. He led the international community — against strenuous objections from many politicians at home — to hold Israel to account. It was a dramatic departure from previous foreign policy. Many accused Carter of being anti-Semitic. The charges hurt him deeply, but he demanded that both the PLO and Israel live up to their end of the bargain. Finally, Israel halted the construction of new settlements.
After his successor had been elected but before she took office, Jimmy Carter sat down with Tom Brokaw for a three-part interview reflecting on his presidency. Brokaw asked about the Middle East peace process at length before asking, “How would you define the Carter Doctrine?”
Carter thought about it for a moment. He had never laid out any definite proposal. There was no singular document to point to. Many had defined it in the context of Carter’s strenuous push for Human Rights. He had not been afraid to send troops to Rwanda to stop the genocide there. With a nod and a smile he answered simply, “A deal is a deal.” It was a reference to Israel — a reference to the fact that he had led the global community in actually enforcing the Camp David Accords. They would not be a set of goals or aspirations — they were a set of policies, and if peace were going to win the day, they had to be protected.
• • •
The legacy of Hubert Humphrey’s maneuvering still looms large in Washington even today. It ushered in a new wave of transparency about the president’s health. When President Scoop Jackson suffered a heart attack in 1983, Americans were glued to their television screens — helping to cement the endearing prominence of a new cable news network, CNN. Now, presidential candidates regularly released medical records in the lead up to the election. Historians remain divided on Humphrey’s legacy, wondering if his decision to conceal the true state of his health from the public should overshadow decades of work on civil rights and other important issues.
Rick Perlstein, the nation’s authoritative historian on American progressivism, credits Humphrey with saving New Deal liberalism in the Democratic Party. His best-selling tome 293 Days chronicles the Humphrey presidency, spending many pages on the effort to coax Carter out of the vice presidency. Perlstein argues it was Humphrey’s greatest act. Though he is critical of Jackson’s foreign policy, he believes it was Scoop Jackson’s presidency that restored America’s trust in government and retained the Democratic Party’s commitment to New Deal principles.
Not all historians accept Perlstein’s assessment, but even former Congressman Newt Gingrich, a two-term wonder in the U.S. House of Representatives and now an Emory University professor, admits that Jackson brought the Democratic Party back to its FDR idealism. Gingrich is a prolific writer who has authored more than 30 books, many of them nonfiction, but one of his more obscure works if In Spite of the Town, an alternate history novel in which Carter wins the Florida primary and takes the 1976 Democratic nomination. He speculates that Carter, who he relegates to a one-term presidency, would have been unable to effectively use the Democratic majorities to advance a legislative agenda, and he even posits that Carter — who would have been more conservative at the time, according to Gingrich — would not have seriously pursued liberal policies like universal healthcare. The book debuted to negative reviews, but Perlstein wrote a glowing article about it in The Atlantic, arguing that Gingrich’s counterfactual narrative pushes back against conventional wisdom that Jimmy Carter was always destined to be a great president.
No one can know what would have been had Jimmy Carter won that first presidential campaign, but many Americans now look back on his eight years in the White House with adoration. They credit him and the Doles with a 24-year period of sustained growth and bipartisan cooperation. Now, as America teeters on the brink of a second Great Depression, they recall those years with nostalgia for what was.
Today, Jimmy Carter remains at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he’s lived all of his adult life — in the same ranch home he’s kept for years. His post-presidency has been relatively quiet. He’s done some traveling and notably helped bring three American hostages home from Iran after being deputized by President Elizabeth Dole. His work with Habitat for Humanity has endeared him in the hearts of many, and he’s published some eighteen books, including a novel of the Revolutionary War. He is a two-time Nobel Peace Prize recipient and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He remains one of America’s most beloved presidents — leaving many to wonder: What if he’d become president even earlier?
He don't plant peanuts,
He don't plant cotton,
But those who plant 'em,
Aren't forgotten,
By old man Carter,
He just keeps rolling along.
Amusing to me how, despite cratering his reputation, Humphrey won, and won so totally he bent Carter into being the sort of president that he wanted when his inevitable comeback occurred. (Frankly, there's a lot of luck there on the Humphrey-Jackson axis' part--it's easy to see a TL where Carter loses that Senate election, stews for eight years in Plains learning about the emotion of anger, and sweeps in against Dole as the tribune of the Yellow Dogs-PPI alliance...)
He don't plant cotton,
But those who plant 'em,
Aren't forgotten,
By old man Carter,
He just keeps rolling along.
Amusing to me how, despite cratering his reputation, Humphrey won, and won so totally he bent Carter into being the sort of president that he wanted when his inevitable comeback occurred. (Frankly, there's a lot of luck there on the Humphrey-Jackson axis' part--it's easy to see a TL where Carter loses that Senate election, stews for eight years in Plains learning about the emotion of anger, and sweeps in against Dole as the tribune of the Yellow Dogs-PPI alliance...)
Ah a President Elizabeth Dole perhaps? A Dole Dynasty replaces the Bush Dynasty of OTL?
Bravo, a great finish to a brilliant story. The poetry of Jimmy Carter becoming the best president he could be, but never would have become without the incidents which denied it to him in the first place, is just perfect. Carter becoming Senator and getting a chance to work on perhaps his weakest point as president, his poor relations with Congress, makes the whole thing fall into place. Somehow it feels like everyone won in the medium-to-long term, although whoever brought on that second Great Depression really couldn't let us get away with it.
It’s mentioned later on that it was President Elizabeth Dole.
I’m guessing his first Nobel Prize was for his work on Israel and Palestine. What was the other one for?
So too summarize
Scoop survives his heart attack and serves out until 1984. BOB DOLE Bob Doles in 1984 and then Bob Doles in 1988 again. Then JIMMEH DEH GREAT. Then Liz Dole Liz Doles into 2000 and 2004. Which leads us into 2008, teetering over the abyss.
Scoop survives his heart attack and serves out until 1984. BOB DOLE Bob Doles in 1984 and then Bob Doles in 1988 again. Then JIMMEH DEH GREAT. Then Liz Dole Liz Doles into 2000 and 2004. Which leads us into 2008, teetering over the abyss.
But ITTL Bob Doleing means winning. So Bob Dole is Bob Doleing, actually.
Bob Dole.
Bob Dole did ensure that Bob Dole balenced the Bob Dole Budget!
