The Road to Endless Wars: Part I

George W. Bush - The Man Who Shouldn't Have Been President

This is not a story about endless wars. Not yet. This is a story about the opening act—how we ended up with the president in office when it all began. The story of these wars begins in Part II.

The Clinton Problem

Bill Clinton was a brilliant man—a Rhodes Scholar who combined Southern charm with elite polish. He was charismatic, agile, and deeply fluent in the mechanics of policy and the moods of the electorate. He presided over a booming economy, slashed the deficit, signed welfare reform, and helped redefine the Democratic Party for a new era. Voters rewarded him. Even in scandal, he remained popular. When he left office, his approval rating was 65%—one of the highest of any modern president.

But that popularity came alongside unwanted baggage. Alongside the achievements was a pattern of evasiveness, self-preservation, and a belief that the rules didn't quite apply to him. His personal behavior was sometimes absent of the kind of morals one would expect of someone in his position, and shady in ways that operated in a zone of questionable legality.

The Lewinsky affair wasn't an isolated incident—it was just the one that pulsated with bright neon lights. And unlike Whitewater or Travelgate or even the Paula Jones case, this time, everyone knew he was lying. It was obvious. He looked the nation in the eye and lied—about something tawdry, something unnecessary, something beneath the office. And once he did, the rest of his presidency became a defensive crouch. The famous "I didn't inhale" was the prelude to "oral sex is not sex."

It was a show of extreme selfishness and narcissism that he would be involved with Monica Lewinsky in the White House under any conditions, especially knowing full well the scrutiny he was under. He wasn't concerned with how it would look, or how it might affect the next election, and hence the nation itself. Hillary has said he's "weak," as if to frame it as a personal struggle. But let's be honest: it wasn't weakness—it was disregard and selfishness. He wanted something and didn't care who else might pay the price.

The other scandals may have been murky. Monica wasn't. She was the proof that Clinton would lie if it suited him—and dare you to prove otherwise.

For his entire term, the Republicans seized on all of this with ruthless focus. They didn't invent scandal politics, but they industrialized it. Independent counsels, endless investigations, manufactured outrage—they kept the Clinton administration under continuous siege. Monica wasn't the fire. She was the accelerant poured on a pile of political kindling stacked over the previous six exhausting years.

The Gore Retreat

Al Gore had every reason to win. He was smart, capable, and experienced. But he wasn't Clinton—and he knew it. Gore was trying to offer Clintonism without the personal deficits, though he never quite said so. In distancing himself from Clinton's baggage, he also lost Clinton's spark, charm, and political brilliance. He inherited the scandal without the magnetism.

Gore was caught between a rock and a hard place. He refused to campaign closely with the president who had overseen the best economy in decades. Gore feared the stink of scandal would cling to him, but in distancing himself from Clinton, he also lost the full momentum of the administration's success. He dulled his message and left voters unsure of what they were voting for. Gore said he wanted change, but he meant change from Clinton's personal behavior. People were confused by what he meant since things were generally good.

The Righteous Wrecking Ball

Enter Ralph Nader. A career moralist who made his name with "Unsafe at Any Speed," Nader styled himself as the principled alternative to two corrupt parties. He claimed there was no difference between Bush and Gore, which was an astoundingly arrogant moral high ground to climb onto.

Nader pulled nearly 100,000 votes in Florida. Bush won the state—and the presidency—by 537 votes. The Republicans kept fighting like a basketball team down by ten with two minutes to go—scrapping, litigating, and pressing every advantage until they caught a good break. Florida wasn't clean. There were tricks, bad calls by the refs, and a full-court legal press. And in the chaos, they eked out the win.

Ralph Nader made his name pontificating about dangerous systems that pretended to be safe—but "Unsafe at Any Speed" turned out to be his autobiography.

Nader didn't cause 9/11 or the endless wars that followed it. But he effectively seated the man who happened to be in office when it all started. This is the part that holier-than-thou crusaders never seem to own: their moral vanity has real-world consequences. Nader didn't live in Baghdad. He didn't get sent to Kandahar. He still insists he did the right thing. Because sanctimony never bleeds—but others do.

The Beginning

Despite Gore winning the popular vote by 543,895 votes, Bush won the electoral college as the result of the Florida win—the beginning of what would become a more frequent occurrence of popular vote winners losing.

George W. Bush didn't win the presidency in 2000 because the country was inspired by his vision or because he brought bold ideas. He won because two men failed: one who treated behavior fitting the president of the United States as optional, and another who mistook his self-righteousness for good.

This is where the road begins. Not with the wars. Not with the terror. But with the political wreckage that cleared the runway. The wars would come—but they began on his watch, with a man who was never meant to be there, making decisions that reshaped the world when the moment came. Whether what followed could or should have been prevented is for Part II.