Mugger

Russ Smith wonders what would have happened with the Bush presdiency if 9/11 had not happened:

Consider an alternative scenario. Bin Laden's plot is foiled on Sept. 11, and life in the U.S. goes along as expected. The economy, still in recession at that point, recovers far more quickly; airlines, while still hurting financially, aren't crippled by a public too frightened to fly; tourism doesn't drop to zero. No anthrax scares. Maybe al Qaeda pulls off a smaller death caper, either in America or abroad, and Bush, unlike Bill Clinton, responds with force. Meanwhile, chastised by advisers for sleeping on the job, Bush returns from his month-long slumber and lobbies for the legislation in Congress he'd planned for the first term—tort reform, partial privatization of Social Security and another round of tax cuts.
No war in Iraq to mobilize the Anybody But Bush activists. No Patriot Act to whip up the fading "Remember Florida" base of the Democratic Party. It's certain that other crises, whether foreign or domestic, would've thrown Bush a curveball, but how he'd have handled them is anybody's guess. The point is this: How can anybody, today, judge what Bush's first term would have accomplished, or not, when he wasn't even in office for a year? Could be he'd be marked a lame duck in 2002 (just as Clinton was in '94); conversely, events might've resulted in an '04 landslide rather than a slim victory.
Nobody, except apparently Gergen, knows. It doesn't really matter, of course, although in future historical tomes about this era, written by liberals, this myth will be presented as fact, and it'll be intellectually dishonest.