Not since 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden, had the United States seen a presidential election so confusing and controversial as that which occurred in the year 2000. As in the earlier balloting, the candidate who finished second in the popular vote, in this case George W. Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, won the presidency by amassing the most electoral votes. Also similar to the earlier election, the battle to determine a victor in this election extended well beyond election day, creating great uncertainty, with the state of Florida playing a crucial role in determining the winner. When Bush began his presidential campaign in 1998, he held a big lead in public opinion surveys over Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat who 379 380 George Walker Bush eventually became his opponent. As late as Election Day in November 2000, the Bush campaign thought it would score a decisive victory over Gore. This assumption made Bush’s second-place finish in the popular vote all the more stunning to him and his supporters. k George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, to George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush. He inherited wealth, prestige, and an impressive political lineage. His paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, served as a U.S. senator from Connecticut for 10 years, from 1952 to 1962. His father, a student at Yale University at the time of his son’s birth, won his first public office in 1966, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; he would go on to serve as vice president under Ronald Reagan and then succeed Reagan in the White House. In the 1950s and 1960s, George W. lived in Midland, Texas, the town his father had moved to in the course of developing an oil business. But in 1961 the young man returned to the East when he enrolled at Phillips Academy (also known as Andover), the same prestigious prep school his father had graduated from in Andover, Massachusetts. George W. again followed in his father’s footsteps when he entered Yale University in 1964. He showed far more attachment to fraternity life, parties, and pranks than he did to academics, but he graduated in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree, after which he returned home and enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard’s pilot-training program. With the Vietnam War under way in the 1960s, it was a controversial move, both at the time and even more so years later when he entered politics. Bush obtained one of the last two slots available in the National Guard despite scoring the minimum grade on a qualifying test. An influential person helped him get his assignment, namely Ben Barnes, speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. After receiving a phone call from a family friend of the Bushes, Barnes contacted the general who was in charge of the Texas Air National Guard and recommended George W. for pilot training. Bush later said he had no knowledge of any such intervention and insisted that his assignment put him in line for service in Vietnam, but, in actuality, there was little chance his unit would be called into combat. The bottom line: Bush joined the National Guard so he could avoid having to fight in Vietnam, a tactic used by thousands of other young men. If, unlike President Bill Clinton, who was fiercely attacked by conservatives for dodging the draft, Bush eventually wore a uniform, he nevertheless used tactics equally self-serving and disingenuous. While in the National Guard, Bush enjoyed preferential treatment. Most notably, in 1972, he obtained a transfer to Alabama so he could campaign for Republican Winton Blount, who was running for the U.S. Senate. Bush later claimed he performed his guard duty while helping Blount, but no records exist to prove the Texan ever reported to his new unit. General William Turnipseed, Bush’s designated commander in Alabama, later said, "Had he reported in, I would have had some recall, and I do not. I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.” In 1973, Bush enrolled in Harvard Business School, and though he disliked the faculty’s liberalism, he earned his M.B.A. in 1975. At that point, he returned to Midland and founded an oil and gas exploration company. Bush later claimed he started his business on a shoestring, with limited money from his trust fund. In actuality, his family had many contacts with influential investors who, over the next few years, provided funds for George W.’s company at a time when the elder Bush was deeply involved in national politics as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, later as a presidential candidate, and as Ronald Reagan’s vice president; clearly, the investors knew that to help George W. would curry favor with Bush, Sr. In 1977, Bush married Laura Welch. They became the parents of twin girls, Barbara and Jenna, in 1982. George W.’s involvement in the oil business again replicated the route followed by his father. One of the elder Bush’s friends said of George W.: "He is always anxious to please his father, and he has done it by emulation. He went to Yale. He was a combat pilot. He went into the oil business in Midland. He ran for Congress. In his way, he tried to relive segments of his father’s life.” The run for Congress occurred in 1978 when Bush campaigned as a Republican against Democrat Kent Hance for the open seat in the district that included Midland. Despite Bush’s attraction to politics, his congressional race surprised some of his friends who remembered his apolitical years at Yale. Bush later said, "They were a little confused about why I was doing this, but at that time Jimmy Carter was president and he was trying to control natural gas prices, and I felt the United States was headed toward European-style socialism.” Hance attacked Bush by portraying him as an eastern elitist who had lost touch with Texas because he had spent time away from the state at schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The tactic worked; although Bush possessed the conservative credentials essential to west Texas politics, the equally conservative Hance outpolled him. Bush returned to his oil business, by then called Arbusto Energy, seeded with money from George L. Ball, CEO of Prudential Bache Securities; William H. Draper III, a venture capitalist; Lewis Lehrman, a multimillionaire; and other investors. They soon encountered financial difficulty; when the price of oil suddenly dropped, Arbusto neared collapse. In 1982, businessman Philip Uzielli poured $1 million into Arbusto, but the company still faltered. Then, in 1984, two other prominent investors, Mercer Reynolds III and William O. Dewitt, bought Arbusto and merged it with another firm to form Spectrum 7—a move that made Bush the company’s third-largest shareholder. After the Harken Energy Corporation acquired Spectrum 7, Bush was rewarded with a lucrative stock deal despite the company’s continued difficulties. In June 1990 he sold two-thirds of his stock at a profit that exceeded $300,000. The inflow of money came at a time Bush was working in his father’s presidential campaign. In 1988, he went to Washington and, as a born-again Christian, he built close contacts with evangelicals, which helped the elder Bush receive 80 percent of their vote. In 1989, just months before Bush sold most of his oil stock, he and 70 other investors bought the Texas Rangers, a professional baseball team in the American League, for $46 million. Bush expended $640,000 and became the owner most recognized by the public. He then obtained a lucrative deal with the city of Arlington, a Dallas suburb, after threatening to relocate the team if they did not get a new stadium. Arlington agreed to boost its sales tax to pay for the facility, while the Rangers agreed to pay $60 million in rent for its use. In return, they would get the title to the property in the year 2002. Since the stadium cost $191 million to build and its value would appreciate over the years, the Rangers stood to reap a handsome return. In 1994, Bush decided to seek public office for the first time since his defeat in the 1978 congressional race. He set his sights on the Texas governorship and challenged the Democratic incumbent, Ann Richards. He benefited from America’s conservative trend and its Republican mood—one that brought the GOP control of Congress—and from his own personable nature. Bush and his chief counselor, Karl Rove, himself a staunch conservative, crafted a right-of-center platform based on welfare reform, increased state financing of public education, and tougher juvenile justice laws. They also used the gun-control issue and attacked Richards for having vetoed legislation that would have allowed Texans to carry concealed weapons. Bush promised he would seek a new concealed-weapons bill. As Bush suspected, Richards’s veto had damaged her standing with conservatives, as George Walker Bush 381 382 George Walker Bush had another of her positions, support of abortion rights for women. Rove, knowing that Bush had the tendency to become flustered and make contorted statements at unplanned events, kept him away from them. Bush defeated Richards by 350,000 votes out of 4.3 million cast. George W. and his father made it seem as if the elder Bush took little part in the gubernatorial campaign, but behind the scenes, George, Sr., offered his son advice on issues and strategy and used his political contacts to the fullest (as he would in his son’s presidential campaign). Having been recently defeated in his own reelection bid for president, George Bush saw his son’s victory as something of a vindication for himself, as well as a rejuvenation of the Bush family political fortunes. George W. entered an office that, constitutionally, was extremely limited; in Texas, most power resides not with the governor but with the legislature. The governor, however, could be instrumental in swaying public opinion and in bringing together competing groups, and Bush excelled in both endeavors. He won high marks for his ability to compromise and get along with the Democratic-controlled legislature. Bush said, "I worked hard to learn the legislative process and . . . to know individual legislators. I knew if I had strong relations with members, I would have stronger relations with their leaders.” Bush made refinancing of education the centerpiece of his term. The courts had already ordered that the disparity between rich and poor districts be lessened, and reforms were enacted under Ann Richards. In 1997, Bush asked the legislature to reduce property taxes substantially and make school funding more equitable by increasing the sales tax by one-half cent and by replacing the corporate franchise tax with a flat-rate business tax. The legislature took Bush’s plan and reworked it, in part by lowering the property tax cut. According to Bush critics Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose in Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, they made "the whole system much fairer.” Bush later said that the reduction in property taxes was "significant for people on the outskirts of poverty, people with low incomes and senior citizens living on a fixed income.” At Bush’s urging the legislature provided money for summer reading programs. He also obtained approval and funds to create more charter schools. Scandal, however, damaged the program when it was revealed that moneys had been mishandled; at one school in Waco, teachers’ paychecks bounced despite the school’s founder having received more than $750,000 in state funds. Bush pushed for another education reform in late 1997 when he proposed that students pass a statewide reading test for promotion from the third to fourth grade; reading and math texts in the fifth grade; and reading, writing, and math tests in the eighth grade. Traditionally, school districts had set the standards for promotion, but the legislature approved his plan (though not until after his reelection). "I propose we begin the new century by putting an end to social promotion in Texas schools,” Bush said. In addition to educational reform, Bush pursued tort reform, and the legislature limited punitive damages that consumers, workers, and others could receive in suits against businesses. Bush claimed that the change would lead to lower insurance rates, but that failed to occur, even though profits for insurance companies increased. Bush opposed a hate crimes bill that was debated in the legislature after James Byrd, Jr., a black man, was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in the summer of 1998. When the bill passed the Texas House, he worked successfully to defeat it in the Senate because it provided protection for gays and lesbians. Ever more desirous of winning the White House, Bush sought to solidify his political standing with a triumphant second term as governor. In 1998, he faced Democratic candidate Garry Mauro, the state land commissioner. After raising $20 million in campaign funds to Mauro’s $3.5 million and promising more George Walker Bush 383 school reform and lower taxes, Bush won reelection in a landslide with nearly 69 percent of the vote. Bush claimed his victory showed "that a Leader who is compassionate and conservative can . . . open the doors of the Republican Party to new faces and new voices.” That same year, he sold his interest in the Texas Rangers for about $15 million, a substantial return on his investment. Throughout his governorship, Bush expressed strong support for property-rights legislation, a position that antagonized environmentalists. After stating "I understand full well the value of private property and its importance not only in our state but in capitalism in general,” he signed legislation requiring that Texas, along with its local governments, compensate landowners whenever government policy impaired their property values. An ardent supporter of the death penalty, Bush enforced it with enthusiasm and while insisting that the Texas legal system, rife with biased juries and incompetent lawyers, worked fairly. He opposed a bill to replace the death penalty with life sentences without parole for severely retarded criminals, and in 1999 he vetoed a bill that would have required each county to establish a system for appointing attorneys to represent indigent defendants. With Karl Rove directing Bush’s political advance, and with Bush anxious to win the White House, in 1999 the governor formally announced his candidacy for president. Many within and outside the Bush family had expected George W.’s younger brother, Jeb, recently elected governor of Florida, to be the Bush who would run for president. One observer said, "When it came to the family business, it was . . . Jeb who was supposed to take over and run the show.” As it turned out, the nation’s Republican leaders quickly rallied around George W. Bush as the candidate best able to recapture the presidency for their party. Nevertheless, the Texas governor faced a surprisingly strong challenge from Arizona senator John McCain, who defeated him in the New Hampshire primary on February 1. Many voters in the primaries admired McCain for his forthrightness, while Bush showed little willingness to venture beyond his standard stump speeches. As the two candidates moved on to South Carolina, the campaign turned negative. In this acrimonious atmosphere, Bush invited criticism when he spoke at Bob Jones University, a conservative school known for its position against interracial dating and for its anti-Catholic bias. (Bush later apologized for his appearance there.) McCain, meanwhile, criticized the religious right when he called its leaders "agents of intolerance.” As Bush had done against Ann Richards in the Texas governor’s race, he effectively positioned himself as the most conservative of the conservative candidates. His defeat of McCain, by a margin of 53 percent to 42 percent, followed by victories in Virginia and Washington state—while McCain won only in Michigan— rejuvenated his campaign. On March 7, Bush won nine of the 13 state primaries held that day, and on March 9, McCain suspended his own campaign, in effect assuring Bush the Republican nomination. In the November general election, Bush faced Vice President Al Gore. Many potential voters cringed at the choice. They disliked Bush’s shallow understanding of crucial issues; they disliked his limited experience, or what Time magazine called "one of the thinnest resumes in a century;” and they disliked his oral gaffes. At various points, Bush stated: "If you’re sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign.” "The fact that he [Gore] relies on facts— says things that are not factual—are going to undermine his campaign.” "We want [teachers] to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there’s not this kind of federal—federal cufflink.” 384 George Walker Bush Other potential voters disliked Gore’s exaggerations—he once claimed he had "invented” the Internet; they disliked his identification with the morally flawed outgoing president, Bill Clinton; and they disliked his stiff, wooden manner. In addition, the two men appealed so strongly to the political center, they took positions on issues only modestly different from each other. The New York Times offered two reasons for this: A less ideological electorate than in previous years, and a changed technology that made it more difficult for the candidates to appeal to one group without offending another, forcing them to take the safe ground to avoid upsetting anyone. But a third reason could be added to the list: that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had used the politics of blandness to achieve victories in the presidential elections of the 1990s and that Bush and Gore wanted to emulate that successful tactic. In October 2000 they participated in three debates. In them, Bush reiterated his plans for a large tax cut, a revamping of Social Security to allow younger contributors to opt for placing their money in a fund that invested in stocks, and restraints on sending American troops overseas. Gore criticized Bush’s tax-cut plan as so unbalanced it would, for the most part, benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of the population. On October 5, the vice presidential candidates, Republican Dick Cheney and Democrat Joseph Lieberman, also engaged in a debate. Seeking an alternative to Bush and Gore, some voters turned to Ralph Nader, candidate of the Green Party, noted for his strong support of campaign finance reform, environmental protection, and programs that would address America’s economic inequities. (Nader had been shut out of the presidential debates.) As the race between Bush and Gore tightened, Gore’s campaign worried that Nader would attract liberals who would normally cast their ballots for Gore and would thus drain enough votes from the Democrat to deny him the presidency. Their fears proved justified. With an electorate unexcited by the campaign—and voter turnout hovering around 51 percent, only a slight improvement from four years earlier— Nader took enough votes from Gore to cost him a victory in the crucial state of Florida (assuming that without Nader in the race nearly all of his supporters would have voted for Gore rather than Bush). Despite public opinion polls indicating a tight race, on the eve of the November 7 election Karl Rove expressed what the New York Times called a "swaggering optimism” about Bush’s prospects; he predicted that his candidate would get 320 electoral votes and would finish first in the popular vote. If that had happened, it would have meant a clear sweep for Bush and a significant mandate. Unfortunately for the Bush campaign, in the final days of the election the momentum swung to Gore. The voters were listening to the vice president’s statements that raised doubts about Bush’s preparedness for the presidency, an assessment that Bush contributed to when he inaccurately indicated that social security was not a federal program. Concerns were also raised by news reports that Bush had been arrested in 1976 for drunk driving and had escaped punishment by falsely stating that he was only an occasional drinker. The reports revived suspicions that as a young man Bush had used cocaine and other drugs, and they called attention to his days of heavy drinking before he renounced alcohol in the 1980s. Troubles with Rove’s prediction and confusion over the election appeared even before the polls had closed across the country and Florida emerged as the most controversial battleground. During the afternoon of November 7, thousands of Democratic voters in Palm Beach County flooded local officials with complaints about the ballot layout. They claimed that the placement of punch holes for Gore and Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan had caused them to vote for Buchanan when they intended to vote for Gore. Indeed, Buchanan received 3,407 votes in the Democratic stronghold, three times higher than his totals in other South Florida counties. George Walker Bush 385 At 8 P.M., the major television networks declared Gore the winner in Florida. Added to his victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, it appeared he would be elected president. But at 10 P.M. the networks retracted their declaration, citing faulty data from exit polls in some precincts. As the returns continued, several other states, most notably New Mexico and Oregon, reported razor-thin margins between Bush and Gore that made it impossible to declare a winner. Then, in the early morning of November 8, the networks declared Bush the victor in Florida and proclaimed him the president-elect. At 2:30 A.M. Gore conceded to Bush. But, in another odd turn, at 3:45 A.M., with Bush’s lead in Florida dwindling to about 500 votes out of more than 5 million cast, Gore rescinded his concession, and a short time later the networks took back their declaration in Florida and classified that state’s vote as too close to call. In those Florida counties that had used punch-hole cards, a disproportionate number of ballots contained no votes whatsoever for president— more than 6,600 in Broward County alone. The Gore campaign suspected that the machine counts could have been wrong or that the mechanisms used in the voting booths could have been faulty and prevented voters from making a complete punch in their cards. Election officials began talking about "chads,” small bits of cardboard that typically fall from computer cards anytime a hole has been punched through them. A chad that has not completely cleared the card and that might be hanging by a corner, or a card that might be only partially indented or dimpled would have failed to record a vote. With that in mind, and his presidential campaign hanging in the balance, Gore began pressing for hand counts in Palm Beach County and in two other Democratic counties, Dade and Broward. Although manufacturers of the machines that used the punch-hole cards claimed that hand counts were more accurate and could resolve any discrepancies, and although several states, including Bush’s home state of Texas, allowed the counting of dimpled cards, Bush went to court in order to stop Gore. (Florida law failed to specify how to handle chads or dimpled cards.) Bush feared that the counting of partially punched cards would give the state of Florida to his opponent. At the same time, voters in Palm Beach County demanded a new presidential vote there; in a legal suit, they claimed that the ballots had been "deceptive, confusing, and misleading.” Despite the uncertainty, Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, a Republican and Bush supporter, certified Bush the winner, entitling him to the state’s electoral votes. Her action sent Gore to the Florida Supreme Court, which overturned her decree and extended the deadline for counties to report their vote totals so that they could proceed with their recounts. The revised deadline, however, turned out to be too short (partly because Bush hampered the process). When the time for reporting the votes expired, Harris again certified Bush the winner, this time by 537 votes, after she refused to include hand recounts from Palm Beach County. Gore’s running mate, Joseph Lieberman, reacted angrily, "How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good-faith effort to count every vote?” At that point, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that "undervotes” in most of the states 67 counties, or about 170,000 ballots, should be recounted. With the deadline nearing for Florida’s electors to meet and cast their votes for president, and with Bush claiming that votes had been counted and recounted ad nauseam, the Republican appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bush, an avowed defender of states’ rights, had decided that he wanted the federal government to overturn a state’s decision in a presidential election: To the surprise of many legal scholars who knew that the Supreme Court seldom intervened in such elections and who realized that many of the justices themselves were conservatives who favored states’ rights, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Bush’s appeal. 386 George Walker Bush A decidedly divided court, whose members had been primarily appointed by Republican presidents, ruled in Bush’s favor. The majority in the decision said that the Florida Supreme Court had failed to specify guidelines needed to safeguard constitutional standards; as a result, there would be too many variations in how votes would be counted, with some county officials looking for mere indentations in the punch cards and others looking for hanging chads. That discrepancy, the court claimed, would violate the Fourteenth Amendment and its guarantee of equal protection to all citizens under the laws. (The decision begged the question, unasked in this case, of whether balloting had also to be uniform. In Florida, as well as several other states, various forms of ballots were used, such as punch cards and electronic ones.) Many critics called the Court’s decision political, based on a partisan and philosophical preference for conservative Republicans. Such criticism gained credence when Newsweek magazine reported that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had sided with Bush, said on the night of November 7 when it looked like Gore might win the White House, that "this is terrible.” (Of course, at the time O’Connor made the remark she had no idea she would be involved in the crucial election case.) One of the dissenting justices, John Paul Stevens, believed so strongly that the Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds and damaged its credibility, that he stated: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of the law.” The Supreme Court’s decision ended Gore’s effort for a recount and left Bush the winner in Florida by less than one-half of 1 percent of the total state vote, giving him just enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Gore responded: "While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. . . . And . . . for the sake of our unity . . . and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.” Many Americas reacted with dismay to the entire election ordeal. "I think the Constitution should be amended,” said Ed Fine of Valley Village, California, "so the Supreme Court meets every four years to select the President, thereby sparing the country the expense and bother of an election.” "This election opened my eyes, revealing truths I wish I did not know,” said Nora Stoneman of Rockford, Illinois. "I’m appalled at the archaic voting systems that have been in place year after year that produce inaccurate voting results. . . . After seeing how this election has been handled, I may never choose to vote again.” "After all the voting, it’s as though a coin were flipped and landed on edge,” said Stan Logue of San Diego, California. "The result is a selection, not an election, and the people in power have devised a rationale for pushing the coin over in one direction.” The election, or debacle as some called it, even caused former president Jimmy Carter, who had monitored dozens of elections overseas, to state, "I was really taken aback and embarrassed by what had happened in Florida. If we were invited to go into a foreign country to monitor the election, and they had similar election procedures, we would refuse to participate at all.” Some analysts blamed Al Gore’s defeat on his failure to embrace Bill Clinton warmly and identify with the positive developments under Clinton’s presidency. According to them, he should have, for example, more strongly identified with the economic prosperity of the Clinton years. Others claimed that Clinton was Gore’s biggest liability. According to one survey, 44 percent of the voters thought the Clinton scandals very important or somewhat important, and of those voters the "vast majority” went for Bush. Pollster John Zogby claimed: "If we hadn’t had the scandals, then Gore would probably have won clearly.” As Bush prepared to enter the White House, he declared that he would pursue his plans to boost defense spending and modernize the military, reform Social Security, make George Walker Bush 387 prescription-drug coverage affordable to Medicare patients, and convince Congress to cut taxes by $1.3 trillion. With the economy slowing in January 2001, he insisted that his tax cut would provide a needed stimulus. He said he would review several of President Bill Clinton’s executive orders to protect the environment, with the implication that he would rescind some of them, and that he would ban federal funding to organizations operating overseas that supported or advocated abortions. Bush appointed a diverse cabinet, in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, as he did with his White House staff, which included Alberto R. Gonzales, a Hispanic, as his counsel, and Condoleezza Rice, an African-American woman, as his national security adviser. Bush’s prominent and high-powered choices for his cabinet indicated that he might well endow that group with substantial power, elevating it above the mere managerial role many recent presidents have allowed. "I’m not afraid to surround myself with strong and competent people,” he told reporters. "I’m going to work with every cabinet member to set a series of goals for each cabinet, for each area of our government. And I’ll work with the cabinet secretaries to help achieve those goals.” That possibility and the persons he selected brought mixed reactions from political analysts and politicians. Some saw in his appointments a strident conservatism that failed to recognize that he had lost the popular vote for the presidency to a moderate. Particularly galling to many Democrats were the nominations of Gale A. Norton as secretary of the interior and John Ashcroft as attorney general. Norton, a former Colorado attorney general, was a strong property- rights advocate. She had frequently expressed her preference for industries to police themselves in determining their compliance with environmental regulations. Ashcroft, a former Missouri senator and governor, brought with him credentials as a born-again Christian who opposed women’s abortion rights and had fought school desegregation plans in St. Louis. James C. Dobson, a leading religious conservative, stated, "If I were president-elect, John Ashcroft would be one of the people that I would be trying to find a spot for.” Indeed, Bush received numerous phone calls from born-again Christians specifically urging him to appoint a religious and social conservative to the attorney general’s office. Ashcroft certainly filled the bill. While serving in the U.S. Senate, he received a 100 percent rating from the Christian Coalition for his votes on issues such as abortion, education, the federal budget, and financing of the arts. The New York Times observed: "If confirmed by the Senate . . . Mr. Ashcroft would reach the highest office ever attained by a leading figure of the Christian right.” Thomas E. Mann, a scholar at the Brooking Institution, said, "Given the Florida recount, the Ashcroft nomination is just breathtaking. Democrats are going through the niceties of the transition period, but beneath the surface there is hostility and disbelief that Bush is proceeding in this fashion.” Writing in Time magazine, political commentator Jack E. White asked, "What was president-elect George W. Bush thinking when he selected John Ashcroft as his nominee for Attorney General? That since he was designating three superbly qualified African Americans for high-level positions—Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Rod Paige—blacks would somehow overlook Ashcroft’s horrendous record on race?” Although liberals and moderates complained about what they saw as the strident conservatism of Bush’s cabinet nominees, other observers insisted that he had selected a pragmatic rather than an ideological group. His choice for secretary of state, former general Colin L. Powell, one of the most prominent and popular African Americans in the country, exuded this pragmatism because Powell attracted a diverse following with views difficult to label either conservative or liberal. And Bush reached out to the Democratic Party when he selected Norman Y. Mineta, President Clinton’s secretary of commerce and a Japanese American, to serve as 388 George Walker Bush secretary of transportation. Yet for the most part, the moderates in his cabinet and on his White House staff tended to occupy foreign policy positions, while conservatives dominated the domestic agencies. As Bush’s cabinet choices faced confirmation by the Senate, troubles loomed. Women’s and civil rights organizations prepared to fight Ashcroft’s nomination; environmental groups vowed to rally against Norton; and Bush’s candidate for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, not only faced opposition from the president of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeny, who called her nomination "an insult to American working men and women,” but also serious legal questions surrounding an illegal alien. Chavez had allowed the alien to stay at her house and perform odd jobs for which she received money, although Chavez said the woman was not an employee. Bush insisted, "I’m sure there’s going to be some tough questioning for some of our nominees. But they’re all fully prepared to handle tough questioning.” In the end, though, the controversy surrounding Chavez and doubts within the FBI about her side of the illegal immigrant story forced her to withdraw from consideration. During the presidential campaign, conservative columnist George Will said that Bush appeared to be a person imbued with "a lack of gravitas—a carelessness, even a recklessness, perhaps born of things having gone too easily so far.” Clearly, Bush faced a challenge to prove such observations wrong. He faced another challenge in building support after having been rejected for the presidency in the popular vote by more than 500,000 ballots cast. Al Gore, in fact, had won more popular votes than any other previous Democratic candidate, and his margin over Bush in that category exceeded that of John Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960 and Nixon over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Bush also had to deal with a divided Congress, with the Senate evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. It was an unusual scene when George Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 2001: He was sworn in by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, one of those on the court who had ruled in his favor. A few weeks later, Bush scored a major victory when Congress enacted his tax cut. But he also suffered several setbacks. His refusal to accept higher standards to fight arsenic contamination in water, his backing away from stricter regulation of carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, and his rejection of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming caused opponents to call him the "Toxic Texan.” By September the economy had slowed, while in foreign policy his preference for unilateral action had alienated several countries, and his disengagement from the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis hampered efforts at reaching a peace agreement in the Middle East. The direction of the Bush administration, and of America in general, changed on September 11, 2001, at 8:46 A.M., when a jet passenger airliner, commandeered by hijackers and loaded with almost-full fuel tanks, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, striking the skyscraper near its top. Sixteen minutes later, as flames and dense smoke poured from the tower, a second airliner struck the south tower. Both buildings weakened as the fierce, fuel-fed fires raged. At 9:59 A.M., the south tower collapsed; at 10:28 A.M., the north tower followed. The disaster took the lives of more than 2,700 people. In Washington, D.C., a third hijacked airliner plowed into the Pentagon at 9:37 A.M. A fourth plane, targeted for another site in the nation’s capital, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers overpowered the hijackers and forced the plane down. The attacks were planned and staged by Al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden. He promoted a Holy War to establish an empire under Islamic law. Bin Laden and his followers viewed the United States as the primary obstacle toward their goal and as the great Satan, corrupting morals throughout the Islamic world. Al Qaeda particularly detested the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (bin George Walker Bush 389 Laden’s birth country), the home of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities for Muslims. President Bush was in Florida during the 9/11 attacks. On his return to Washington, he vowed the perpetrators would be punished. He soon boldly announced a War on Terror, and as Americans, stunned, saddened, and enormously angered by the attacks, rallied around him, his popularity soared. Support for Bush strengthened even further when the United States invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, to topple its fundamentalist Islamic rulers, the Taliban. Afghanistan had given refuge to Al Qaeda and allowed bin Laden to set up terrorist training camps on its soil. The U.S. offensive caused the Taliban government to collapse in November, and a pro-American regime was established in the capital of Kabul. But bin Laden, a prime target of the assault, remained on the loose. As part of the War on Terror, the United States disrupted the flow of money from various sources to Al Qaeda and shut down front organizations and charities that were funneling money to the terrorist group.