This is the fifth episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, The Election of 1932, was published on June 17.
It was the closest presidential election in U.S. history. Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush defeated Democratic Vice President Al Gore 271 to 266 in the Electoral College, and by fewer than 500,000 votes in the popular vote tally out of more than 100 million cast ballots.
In Florida, where recounts dragged on for weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in Mr. Bush’s favor, the Republican claimed the state by a mere 537 votes. The possibility that thousands of voters in Palm Beach County mistakenly punched the name of Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan because of a confusing ballot irks Mr. Gore’s supporters to this day.
Within nine months of Mr. Bush’s victory, the nation was throttled by the al Qaeda terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, as Americans put aside their political differences to rally around the president and the flag. The spectacular violence of Sept. 11, 2001, and the long “war on terrorism” that followed has obscured memories of a relatively tame 2000 campaign. The candidates argued over how best to spend a federal budget surplus. And without an obvious powerful enemy on the global stage, they were left to debate where and how to apply uncontested U.S. power in what seemed like a relatively peaceful world — or at least a world without any major wars.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel delve into the issues that mattered to Americans at the onset of a new, prosperous, peaceful decade.
“There was a sense that the United States was in a very secure world. This was thought of as the unipolar moment,” said Mr. Suri, a historian at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
“There was a real sense of American elites that globalization is just the way of the future. It’s not even worth debating. It’s kind of like asking if we need oxygen or not… but as we’ve seen over the past two decades, complaints of the people who were left behind [by globalization] only increased,” said Mr. Engel, the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
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