What if...?
What if 9/11 had just been a normal day?
Got to admit, in the last twenty years I’ve not seen someone play out the alternative history in which 9/11 didn’t happen.
by Jack Hughes
Since Disney acquired Marvel comics, home to Captain America and the Avengers, it has massively expanded the vast cinematic universe created by Kevin Feige – in my view the best narrative storyteller of the 21st century. Among recent successes is the weekly series now streaming on Disney+ What If…?which explores alternate realities and timelines involving many of Marvel’s most iconic heroes and villains.
Each episode begins with an omnipresent celestial being, The Watcher, offering this helpful explanation: “Time. Space. Reality. It’s more than a linear path – it’s a prism of endless possibilities where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities creating alternate worlds from the ones you know. I’m The Watcher. I’m your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me and ponder the question – What If…?”
While we’re not omnipresent celestial beings – most are mere omnivorous celebrity believers – that doesn’t mean we can’t ponder the question ‘What If?’ about our real-world reality. And as we mark the twentieth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan there’s one question that likely lingers in the back of most of our minds – What if 9/11 never happened?
If he’s right in saying a slight change or single choice can create infinite possibilities, imagine the enormous impact if an epochal atrocity such as the 9/11 attacks had not occurred. You could go down a rabbit hole on how the economy, arts and culture, technology, not to mention relations between nations and religions might’ve evolved differently over the past two decades. But it’d be especially true of American politics.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush’s first stop was, famously, to a grade two classroom at a school in Sarasota, Florida. The reason for the event was that Bush’s early presidency, controversial given the circumstances in which it came to be, had seen few notable achievements as of yet apart from the No Child Left Behind Act on which he’d been working alongside Senator Ted Kennedy.
According to Gallup, Bush’s approval ratings for the period September 7th to 10th had him at 51%, the lowest result of his time in office to that date. The trends had been consistent over the preceding months with his approval ratings generally in the middling 50s for much of the year with only a few fleeting blips above 60%. (For context, Joe Biden’s approval ratings today, the very same week, are averaging 45%.)
More to the point, as Bush sat with the schoolchildren there was nothing to suggest things were about to change or his approval ratings would increase significantly in the weeks ahead. In our ‘What If?’ scenario nothing did happen. Bush listened to the reading of The Pet Goat by the second-graders from Emma E. Booker Elementary School uninterrupted and then continued with the rest of his itinerary as scheduled.
Absent the 9/11 attacks, Bush’s presidency might’ve continued as it began – focused on domestic priorities with bipartisan support becoming increasingly elusive as the economy remained in a recessionary slump. As September gave way to November, there’d almost certainly be a veritable panoply of ‘year after’ retrospectives on the contentious 2000 election and controversial Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore.
Come 2002, another anniversary would assuage disheartened Democrats: It’d be 10 years since the first President George Bush was defeated after a single term. Senator Hillary Clinton would barnstorm battleground states using the throwback ‘It’s still the economy, stupid’ mantra for the 2022 midterms. In Texas, Clinton loyalist Paul Begala would joke “the only proven cure for 4 years of Bush is 8 years of Clinton!”
In our reality – which is to say in reality – Republicans secured control of Congress in 2002 with gains in the House and Senate. While not entirely without precedent for presidents in their first term, its definitely unusual. Had 9/11 not happened, and the country not rallied around the White House and War on Terror, a more common outcome would’ve been for the Democrats to gain seats and possibly hold the Senate.
If so, Bush would have been preparing to launch his reelection campaign faced with a strengthened Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and an emboldened frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary, who earned political chits from those she’s helped get re-elected such as, for example, Georgia Senator Max Cleland whose opponent Saxby Chambliss wasn’t able to compare him to Osama bin Laden.
An epic Bush vs. Clinton rematch might’ve seen Bush learn lessons from his father’s loss. Bush had advised his dad to dump Dan Quayle as his running mate in 1992 – ironically in favor of Dick Cheney. If our ‘What If?’ polls were close in 2002, Bush might’ve taken his own advice and dumped Cheney for Condoleezza Rice. (In our reality Bush voted for Rice in the 2020 presidential election as a write-in candidate.)
Don’t worry about Cheney, though, it’d mean he could be appointed to the Senate from his home state of Wyoming when Senator Craig Thomas died of leukemia in 2007. It’d be an historic appointment as two former Vice Presidents would be in the Senate at the same time – with Walter Mondale having won the Minnesota Senate seat held by Senator Paul Wellstone who himself died, in an airplane crash, in 2002.
As for the 2004 Presidential Election? Well, in our reality Bush defeated Senator John Kerry with a close 286 to 251 electoral college vote tally. But in a ‘What If?’ contest against Hillary could the result have changed? If Hillary won Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico – states she did ultimately take in the 2016 election – she would’ve garnered a razor-thin win with 270 electoral college votes over Bush’s 267.
And if Hillary won in 2004 it would’ve impacted every presidential election since. Barack Obama wouldn’t have challenged a sitting Democrat president in 2008 – his date with destiny deferred to at least 2012, by which time he wouldn’t need Joe Biden’s experience on his ticket. And ‘What If?’ President Hillary attended Donald Trump’s wedding, as SenatorHillary did in our reality, days after the inauguration.
Might her wedding gift have been a plum foreign posting somewhere far overseas?
*******
In the end, the thing about ‘What If?’ questions is while there are no correct answers but there can be careless answers. Revisionist history about a terrible tragedy which claimed the lives of so many, both directly and indirectly, must avoid trivializing the continued pain and suffering of those who lost loved ones. While we may briefly imagine a fictional alternate reality, we can never forget the horrifying actual reality.
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” “Bidenfeld,” “Firth and Firthiness,” “The Ballot of Bill McKay,” and “The World Wants ‘The West Wing,’” among others. His inexplicably extensive writings on Dan Quayle are “The Unusual Suspect,” “The Unusual Suspect II,” “The GOPfather,” “Porqua, CoQau?” and “Quayle’s Hunting Season.” Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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