The 2000 Election: George W. Bush Wins by One Vote 855Israel retaliated with tank and helicopter attacks on
suspected terrorist strongholds. The negotiations col-
lapsed. Arafat unleashed a new wave of uprisings, and
hardliners, headed by Ariel Sharon, took charge of
Israel. Violence intensified on both sides.
Whatever the successes and shortcomings of his
administration, the Clinton presidency will always be
linked to his relationship with a White House intern
and the impeachment proceedings that ensued.
Though by no means the first president to stray from
matrimonial propriety, Clinton’s behavior, in an era
when the media thrived on scandal, was symptomatic
of an almost willful self-destructiveness.
The Economic Boom and the Internet
A significant part of the prosperity of the 1990s came
from new technologies such as cellular phones and
genetic engineering. But the most important was the
development of a revolutionary form of communica-
tion: the Internet. Developed in the 1970s by U.S.
military and academic institutions to coordinate
research, the Internet initially proved an awkward
means of linking information. Data in one computer
did not readily relate to that elsewhere. The
Internet was a communication system that lacked a
common language.
That was remedied in the early 1990s by Tim
Berners-Lee, a British physicist working at a research
institute in Switzerland. He devised the software that
became the grammar—the “protocols”—of the
Internet “language.” With this language, the Internet
became the World Wide Web (WWW), a conduit for a
stream of electronic impulses flowing among hun-
dreds of millions of computers.
The number of Web sites increased exponentially.
In 1995 Bill Gates’s Microsoft entered the picture
with its Windows operating system, which made the
computer easy to use. It created a Web browser—
Microsoft Internet Explorer—and embedded its soft-
ware in the Windows 95 bundle. This provoked
howls of protest from Netscape as well as from other
service providers: America Online, CompuServe, and
Prodigy. Microsoft, they complained, was threatening
to monopolize access to and use of the Internet. (A fed-
eral judge concurred, ordering that Microsoft be bro-
ken up; his ruling was overturned on appeal in 2001.)
In the meantime, Jeff Bezos dreamed of using
the Internet to sell books. In 1995 his company,
Amazon.com, sold its first book. Within six years, its
annual sales approached $3 billion. Bezos became one
of the richest men in the nation.
If Bezos could use the Web for selling books, oth-
ers imagined they could sell everything from pet food
to pornography (eBay, an Internet auction house, had
an online catalog consisting of three million items).
Many start-up companies (dot-coms, in the slang of
the day) consisted of little more than the hopes of the
founders. “Venture capitalists,” independent investors
seeking to fund emerging “tech” companies, sensed a
glittering new economic frontier somewhere down the
Internet superhighway, and they poured billions into
start-up dot-coms. In 1999 some 200 Internet com-
panies “went public,” selling shares in the major stock
exchanges. They raised $20 billion easily. The prices of
dot-com stocks kept on climbing though few gener-
ated profits; some lacked any revenue whatsoever.
In the spring of 2000, with the stock market still
surging, a selling wave hit the tech stocks and spilled
over to other companies. Stock prices plummeted. In
all, some $2 trillion in stock funds disappeared. As the
2000 election approached, many feared that the
economy was nearing a recession.The 2000 Election: George W. Bush
Wins by One Vote
During the 2000 campaign, Vice President Al Gore
secured the Democratic nomination and chose as
running mate Senator Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut, an observant Jew and outspoken critic
of Clinton during the impeachment proceedings.
The leading contender was George W. Bush, son
of former President Bush. Like his father, Bush gradu-
ated from Yale and worked in the family oil business.
He headed a group that bought the Texas Rangers
baseball team. Although some doubted Bush’s abili-
ties, his visible success with the Rangers catapulted
him into Texas politics. An effective and personable
campaigner, he was elected governor in 1994. Six
years later he defeated Senator John McCain of
Arizona in a battle for the Republican nomination for
president. Bush selected as running mate Dick
Cheney, who had served as defense secretary in his
father’s administration.
Consumer activist and environmentalist Ralph
Nader also entered the presidential race, running on
the Green party ticket. This worried Gore, author of
Earth in the Balance; he had hoped to carry the envi-
ronmentalist vote.
The main issue was what to do with the federal
surplus, which by some projections would soon
exceed $1 trillion. Bush called for a substantial tax
cut; Gore wanted to increase spending on education
and shore up the Social Security system.
Gore, though knowledgeable, seemed stiff, and
he occasionally indulged in self-serving bombast, as