Did you know George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the U.S., was a cheerleader? He was a cheerleader in high school and continued to be one when he attended Yale University in the 1960s.
In 2000, Bush decided to run for president of the United States, an office his father held from 1989 to 1993. He ran against the sitting vice president, Al Gore. Their contest ended with a hotly disputed debate over how to count votes in Florida, a state governed by Bush’s younger brother Jeb.
After the first tally, Bush led by a small margin in the Sunshine State. But then some people stepped forward and said they’d voted for the wrong person by accident because the ballots were hard to read. The presidency would now be decided by recounting some of the ballots in Florida.
For 36 days, the world waited to see who would become the next president. Finally the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, decided by a 5-4 vote that Bush was not receiving equal protection and due process (or fair treatment) under the Constitution, and they stopped the recounts. Bush had won Florida.
In many countries, the candidate with the most votes wins. But citizens of the United States participate in a more complex, two-step process. After individual citizens across the country vote, a group called the electoral college chooses the president. Based on population, each state has a certain number of delegates, or voters, in the electoral college who vote for the president according to how people in their state voted. The candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all the state’s delegates.
Winning Florida gave Bush enough electoral college votes to win the presidency, even though Gore received some 500,000 more votes than Bush, winning the popular vote. Bush became the first president in more than a century to reach the White House without carrying the nation’s popular vote. Only John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison before him did the same. (Unlike these previous presidents, Bush was reelected four years later.)
Not since John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams (the second and sixth presidents) had a father and his son each become president of the United States.
Credit : National Geographic
Picture Credit : Google
