Featuring: Philip Brooks & Gerardo Duran
Editor: Mia Tamayo
Introduction: In this American history episode, Phil and Gerardo discuss Bush II, Sep 11, and the 21st Century.
Phil: Today we're going to discuss Bush II, 9/11 and the 21st century. Let's start off with the election of 2000. In this election, the Democrats nominated Vice President Al Gore, while Republicans nominated Governor George W. Bush, son of George H.W. Bush, the former president. After Democrats were forced to face the results of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, they experienced a downturn in popularity as voters chose family values over climate change issues, championed by Gore. Eventually, this resulted in an extremely close election in which Al Gore won the popular vote. Yet, George Bush won the electoral vote, only a few votes in Florida would have changed the outcome of this election. But the Supreme Court ruled there will be no recounts and Bush became president in January. To preface this Bush administration, I'd like to mention that many of these actions were directed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who had achieved unprecedented levels of power from the President. Throughout the 1990s, I'm going to start with domestic policy.
Phil: Throughout the 1990’s, people had severely over-speculated the boom in internet based companies, as a result of their rousing success. As a result, the “.com bubble” was created, as people had too much faith in these stocks. As they did that, the bubble burst in the early 2000’s. When a recession began, this forced an increase in government spending, but Bush promised lower taxes. So, the United States government ran an enormous deficit, which raised the interest rates countering the effect of the spending.
Phil: Another domestic policy was the creation of “No Child Left Behind”, which was an education program that focused on keeping children at the same level, regardless of their wealth or academic aptitudes, by encouraging states to standardized testing for students. Another hugely impactful moment of the Bush presidency was Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out Louisiana, especially a major city, New Orleans. Bush's slow response earned him severe criticism from the media.
Phil: Lastly, for domestic issues, the 2008 recession was marked by soaring unemployment caused by rising oil prices, which were the result of all the wars, which I'll get into a bit later. In 2009, the stock market crash revealed the worst effects of the recession. Obviously, I left the more prominent things in foreign policy. So let's get started.
Phil: In 2001, the terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda launched an attack on the United States in a few areas, but was really only successful in the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City. Many Americans died and people were shocked by the event leading to a surge in Islamophobia. After this, the military was sent on several missions to capture the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, in the war on terror. Despite this war, President Bush made it clear that the war was not waged on Muslims, only radical extremists to terrorists. By 2001, Bush went to war on Afghanistan in order to fight the Taliban. And in 2003, he went to war with Iraq to defeat Saddam Hussein. Also in 2001, the Patriot Act was signed to extend surveillance on Americans and foreigners entering the country in order to prevent more attacks. Because of the ongoing war, people were significantly more inclined to vote for the incumbent. People were feeling more united than ever, and besides, the Democratic candidate, John Kerry was not very charismatic, and so he lost that election to Bush. Gerardo, is there anything that you want to mention really quickly?
Gerardo: The impact of 9/11 had a lot of withstanding effects that the concept of air travel safety changed with the emergence of the TSA. You have also increased tensions in regards to culture. So the Islamophobia that Phil mentioned was not the only thing that was prominent in this time period. As a continuation of a previous decades, there's continued discrimination against African Americans.
Gerardo: Moving on to something interesting about the 2000’s, the rise of social media is really important in this time period. You'll see a lot of these interactions come in through these forms of social media; YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and they are really important in connecting people together and getting them more informed than ever before. It's during this time period, that people begin to have more information at their fingertips. Also, the iPhone was released in 2008.
Phil: So that about wraps up this episode. Next we'll have our last episode at least where Gerardo and I participate. So I hope you look forward to that. Thanks for reading, you guys.
Fin~
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