For the last two years, Americans have been told tomorrow’s vote is “the most important election in modern times.” This is an attractive idea, since the stakes are so high, but it’s just not true. The most important election of our time happened in 2000, and America lost.

Most of us have a hard time remembering the long weeks America suffered through as we waited for an answer to the question, “Who will lead the nation into the 21st Century?” The choice was stark and the divisions between the sides were fierce.

There was the Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore, a visionary liberal whose eight years in office had helped usher in one of America’s most prosperous peacetime economic booms.

Gore was a wonkish internationalist; a progressive who wanted the U.S. to face up to its dependence on foreign oil and its toxic industrial legacy. He was a serious and deeply moral leader who promised a better America. Al Gore was the face of hope.

And then there was the Republican George W. Bush. He was a former drunken party boy whose powerful family had sheltered him during the Vietnam War and bailed him out of every one of the failed business ventures he had dreamed up since college.

As governor of Texas, Bush had built a shameful record of complicity with campaign contributors and far-right Christian lobbyists. He was an intellectual lightweight who only promised handouts for his rich friends. George W. Bush was the face of disaster.

On Election Day, Gore received half a million more votes than Bush, but a corrupt count in Florida and a 5-4 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court handed Bush the prize. The fix was in, America had become an electoral laughing-stock, and it would only get worse.

The new Bush Administration was fixated on what they considered the embarrassing dénouement of George H. W. Bush’s liberation of Kuwait in 1991. Bush neo-conservative operatives had just begun plotting their Iraqi oilfield land grab when fate intervened in the guise of 19 Saudi highjackers. Suddenly, everything had changed.

It’s now clear the Bush team cynically manipulated the events of 9/11 during their mad power grab, which eventually culminated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Thousands of American and coalition fighters have been killed, tens of thousands have been wounded and uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been swept away by the arrogant hubris of the Bush regime’s deadly folly.

But once the Bush Junta had remade the American presidency into the twisted dictatorship they call “The Unitary Executive,” they were not about to relinquish control. It was to be Buschland über alles; a cornucopia of executive crimes that included illegal detention, unwarranted surveillance, extraordinary rendition, judicial interference and unprecedented secrecy.

The Bush Crusade eclipsed America’s traditional democratic ideals behind the dark side of their corrupt incompetence – and once in power, they insisted on pursuing their naïve and destructive neo-con fantasies unchecked.

In the Bush model, endless partisan terror-tactics waged by character assassins like Karl Rove replaced the traditional mechanics of actual governing. By the time the Bush thugs had swift-boated their way through the presidential re-election of 2004, the stage was set for a reversal of America's military and economic fortunes.

Over the last four years, as America struggled to hold back rebel insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the inept domestic leadership of the Bush Idiocracy has become obvious to all but the most ardent Republican apologists.

The Bush economic legacy is one of utter chaos and mismanagement. The administration’s philosophy of “voluntary regulation” was so damaging that Americans have had to shell out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out the same institutions that caused our economic decline in the first place. And there’s no end in sight.

The horrors of 9/11 may still have been visited upon us if Al Gore would have been in the White House, but nobody can possibly argue that America would have been bogged down in Iraq, or banks would have been allowed to regulate themselves, or industries would have been given a free hand to pollute had Gore been allowed to lead.

By every measure, military, economic, educational and social, the election of 2000 will probably turn out to be the most important vote this nation has ever taken.

America has been fundamentally changed for the worse by the presidency of George W. Bush, and the world has suffered mightily under his rule as well. Tomorrow’s vote is undoubtedly significant, but it pales in comparison with the crucial choice we faced eight years ago.