2000

The American Presidential Election of 2000

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• published: 21 Oct 2016
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Mr. Beat's band: http://electricneedleroom.net/ Mr. Beat on Twitter: https://twitter.com/beatmastermatt Donate to Mr.Beat for prizes: https://www.patreon.com/iammrbeat The 54th episode in a very long series about the American presidential elections from 1788 to the present. They'll be done by Election Day. In 2000, it's one of the closest elections ever as the Supreme Court has to step in to end the madness. Oh, and we didn't find out the winner for over a month after Election Day. Feeling dorky? Visit here: http://www.countingthevotes.com/2000 The 54th Presidential election in American history took place on November 7, 19- I mean, 2000. (The Year 2000) It was the first election I could finally vote in! And boy, was it a messed up one. We wouldn’t even know who won until over a month later. As Bill Clinton left office, the economy was strong, and he had a fairly high approval rating. Sure, there was the whole impeachment thing due to the whole Monica Lewinsky thing. Oh yeah, and there was Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and so forth and so on, but many argue the United States was preparing to enter the 21st century stronger than ever before. Because of this, the Democratic Party went with Clinton’s Vice President, Al Gore, to be their nominee for President. His only real opponent trying to get the nomination was Bill Bradley, the former Senator from New Jersey and former professional basketball player. But Bradley withdrew in March, so it was Gore, with Joe Lieberman, a Senator from Connecticut, as his running mate. Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a major political party presidential ticket. The Republican Party originally had many candidates trying for the nomination, but most of them didn’t stand much of a chance against George W. Bush, the popular governor of Texas and son of George H.W. Bush. Bush’s main opponent in the primaries was John McCain, a Senator from Arizona and war hero who was tortured as a POW in the Vietnam War. However, after a poor showing on Super Tuesday, the day when there are a bunch of primary elections at once across the country, McCain dropped out. One guy who stuck around until right before the convention was Alan Keyes, a former diplomat to the Reagan administration. He just kept fighting. And one thing that is absolutely true, that I actually quite admire, is that Alan Keyes remains the only presidential candidate in history to ever jump into a mosh pit on the campaign trail. Michael Moore jokingly gave him his endorsement after he featured the historic moment on his show “The Awful Truth.” Anyway, yeah George W. Bush won. You know that, don’t you? He had all the right friends in the right places, the right last name, and oh yeah, a lot of people loved him. Bush asked Dick Cheney, a former Secretary of Defense, to lead a team to help him find a running mate, but in the end, Bush just went with Cheney to be his running mate. However, because Cheney also lived in Texas, he had to change his voting registration back to his old home of Wyoming, because otherwise the electoral votes they would presumably get from Texas would not count. While there were a lot of third party candidates, I will only mention the Green Party for this election. The Green Party had been around in some form or another since the 1980s, and had a platform that focused on environmental causes. They nominated Ralph Nader, the famous activist and lawyer who had sparked reform by getting numerous consumer protection laws passed. The Green Party also nominated Winona LaDuke, an activist, economist, and writer from California, as Nader’s running mate. Both Nader and LaDuke had run together back in 1996, but had gotten less than 1 percent of the vote, which is why I didn’t even mention them in that episode. The two frontrunners, Bush and Gore, mostly focused on domestic issues. Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the associated scandal with Monica Lewinsky did cast a shadow on the campaign, but Gore tried to convince Americans he was not Clinton. He rarely appeared with Clinton on the campaign trail, and some say this hurt his campaign. Bush called for a more humble foreign policy (clip) and more unity and less partisanship in Washington. Nader, meanwhile, had super rallies in places like Madison Square Garden.