...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
W. (Video Game)
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https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/W | |
W. (Video Game) | comment |
W. (pronounced "Dubya") is a Game Mod for the browser game The New Campaign Trail. In it, you play as George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States of America, in an alternative timeline in which the September 11 Attacks and the subsequent War on Terror never took place. Consequently, Bush never benefits from a popularity boost from its fallout, and finds himself in a difficult position as he emerges bruised and battered from the 2002 midterm elections. From there, you will need to maneuver in the next two years, to push your agenda through, choose whether to pursue war or peace abroad, and secure your re-election at home. It can be played here on the Campaign Trail Showcase site.In contrast with the game's usual, relatively neutral writing style, W. is written from the perspective of a 2000s-era liberal, serving as both a scathing critique on Bush's presidency and as a broader reflection on 2000s politics. | |
W. (Video Game) | fetched |
2024-05-15T08:47:15Z | |
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2024-05-15T08:47:15Z | |
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Dropped link to CharliesAngels2000: Not a Feature - ITEM | |
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Dropped link to JesseVentura: Not a Feature - ITEM | |
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Dropped link to RevengeOfTheSith: Not a Feature - ITEM | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_132e865c | type |
Earn Your Bad Ending | |
W. (Video Game) / int_132e865c | comment |
Earn Your Bad Ending: Because of Robert Byrd's combination of elderly age, past Klan membership and anti-war beliefs which appeal to no demographic in particular, it takes much effort and creativity to actually lose to him. Doubly so if you fired Cheney, stopping a third war that tanks your poll numbers from occurring. Losing to Byrd without starting a third war even gives you the "Losing America" achievement. Winning against the Clinton/McCain unity ticket while running an all-out smear campaign against them is very hard, as the last minute reveal of Bush's role behind the obscene attacks against his opponents destroys much of the support he had up to that point. Even if you perfectly optimize your answers by the end, the actual outcome is still very much a Luck-Based Mission. | |
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Heroic BSoD | |
W. (Video Game) / int_143919ff | comment |
In the ending where Bush loses all 50 states against Gephardt and Ventura, he suffers a humiliation of historic proportions that leaves a permanent stain on the reputation of his family and all his close associates. However, being disillusioned by the sheer absurdity of his failure and having nothing to lose anymore, George, for once, finds inner strength to defy Poppy's expectations and continue living as his own man, free of his father's oppressive shadow. | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_169d22e6 | type |
Villain Team-Up | |
W. (Video Game) / int_169d22e6 | comment |
Villain Team-Up: For a given definition of villain, the secret path for Hillary Clinton (achieved by the only success of Bush's administration being the Grand Bargain over Social Security) has her team up with Bush's old 2000 primary rival John McCain as "co-presidents". The Clinton/McCain ticket serves as the hardest ticket for Dubya to beat in the mod, not helped by dirty tricks against them always backfiring on Bush when it's discovered that his campaign is spreading slander. | |
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"Well Done, Son" Guy | |
W. (Video Game) / int_1779f10e | comment |
"Well Done, Son" Guy: Dubya is portrayed as desperately craving his father's respect and affection of his father, while never managing to get it. This fits into the broader style of the mod being written in the style of a 2000s hit piece on Bush, with it being one of the common tropes in Bush caricatures. | |
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Unwinnable by Design | |
W. (Video Game) / int_1bd4c0bf | comment |
Unwinnable by Design: The "Back Home in New Haven" (which entails making Poppy proud) achievement is unobtainable for the player no matter what they do and has no trigger in the code. The only way to get the achievement is to obtain it using a console cheat. | |
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Different World, Different Movies | |
W. (Video Game) / int_258a5cfe | comment |
Different World, Different Movies: If the player in fuels enough jingoism to launch a war against Iran, the Revenge of the Sith will turn into an explicit attack against the Bush administration, with George Lucas (who in Real Life never acknowledged that any American president influenced Palpatine's depiction other than Richard Nixon) outright stating that the movie is about Bush while presenting the final cut to the Cannes Film Festival. If Bush defeats the Clinton/McCain ticket through extreme mudslinging, a third Charlie's Angels film gets made as part of Hollywood leaning into superficial "girlboss" feminism to capitalize on backlash to the administration. | |
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Breaking the Glass Ceiling | |
W. (Video Game) / int_2629c82a | comment |
Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Plenty of potential examples. Hillary Clinton as the first female president, Al Sharpton as the first black one, and either Joe Lieberman or Paul Wellstone as the first Jewish POTUS. | |
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Bilingual Bonus | |
W. (Video Game) / int_294ed981 | comment |
Bilingual Bonus: President Wellstone's North Korea war ending screen is an untranslated People's Daily article in Chinese, documenting the joint statement of Wellstone and Chinese President Hu Jintao to assure peace in the Korean peninsula. | |
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Allohistorical Allusion | |
W. (Video Game) / int_2a035a26 | comment |
Allohistorical Allusion: In the ending where WW3 starts while running against Ted Kennedy, Dubya gets a "strange sense of deja vu" from being in an elementary school classroom while the missiles fly. | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_3763bcf8 | type |
False Rape Accusation | |
W. (Video Game) / int_3763bcf8 | comment |
Downplayed with Al Sharpton and his home state of New York. Sharpton polls well in New York despite his past controversies and involvement in the Tawana Brawley case (where a young black woman falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her)... but the state is well within the reach of the Bush campaign and Sharpton usually loses the state whenever Dubya pulls off a landslide. | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_40cc0c7e | type |
Bittersweet Ending | |
W. (Video Game) / int_40cc0c7e | comment |
Bittersweet Ending: In many endings, Bush achieves reelection, partly securing his legacy as more than a lame duck, but he still doesn't get the approval of his domineering father, George H. W. Bush, leaving him to feel empty inside as he goes to greet the ecstatic crowds. In the ending where Bush loses all 50 states against Gephardt and Ventura, he suffers a humiliation of historic proportions that leaves a permanent stain on the reputation of his family and all his close associates. However, being disillusioned by the sheer absurdity of his failure and having nothing to lose anymore, George, for once, finds inner strength to defy Poppy's expectations and continue living as his own man, free of his father's oppressive shadow. | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_42a95f60 | type |
Taking Up the Mantle | |
W. (Video Game) / int_42a95f60 | comment |
Taking Up the Mantle: Ted Kennedy occupies the same role of continuing his family's legacy, but this time it's against a George W. Bush who has fired a large part of his cabinet and whose tenure has been ravaged by scandals. If he manages to live up to his brothers' legacies after winning against Bush is another story though. Without any wars going on, Ted Kennedy manages to preside over a triumphant first term where he implements many of his signature policies and the Republicans sink further into extremism (nominating Ron Paul as their presidential nominee) with seemingly no chance of turning their fortunes around... only for Senator Sanders to warn about the popping of the housing bubble (the OTL precursor to the Great Recession)- ending on an ominous Cliffhanger. If there's one war going on, Kennedy slips further and further into the role of a Puppet King as his cabinent starts to take advantage of his failing health to continue the war. If there's two wars ongoing, Kennedy's term is a complete failure as he fails to end the wars and is unable to pass any legislation (including Universal Healthcare, now watered down to an Obamacare-style bill). With the president largely absent from the public eye, a much more aggressive Bush is able to snatch the nomination from Ron Paul with the election looking lopsided in his favor. | |
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We Used to Be Friends | |
W. (Video Game) / int_51a3ba7 | comment |
We Used to Be Friends: Joe Lieberman launches his presidential bid against Bush expecting it to be friendly competition between ideas, not personalities. Bush can choose to disregard such etiquette and launch a thrashing campaign to tarnish the reputation of Lieberman among the voters. In that case, he will feel betrayed and can even break down into tears after the debate. | |
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Cutting Off the Branches | |
W. (Video Game) / int_52475ffd | comment |
Cutting Off the Branches: The "Historical Result" section in the ending screen shows Ted Kennedy winning against Bush in a sweeping 451-87 landslide, confirming this as the "canonical" outcome. | |
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Vote Early, Vote Often | |
W. (Video Game) / int_585db628 | comment |
Vote Early, Vote Often: Heavily implied by the DC staffer in the 50 state victory against Byrd ending, who states that they couldn't let Washington D.C. get embarrassed by being the only state Byrd wins and claims that "Lyndon Johnson was one of our greatest presidents and he did it all the time" (a reference to LBJ using voter fraud to win in large landslides back during his earlier days). | |
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Puppet King | |
W. (Video Game) / int_5a100b90 | comment |
Puppet King: Averted with Dick Cheney (for most of the mod). Despite the Democrats joking about President Bush merely being a puppet of the much more experienced Cheney, this isn't shown to be the case in the mod. Bush can make decisions contrary to Dick's wishes and even has the option to drop Cheney from the ticket against his will (gaining the achievement "SAM239" in the process). In fact, it takes a large number of people in Bush's cabinet to actually convince the president to start a third war and Dubya can choose to invade another country instead of Cheney's preferred target Iran. This is played completely straight in one route of the mod however. If Bush gives too much influence to Cheney, he will create a shadow administration using his network of political connections and control the Presidency behind Bush's back. If the player chooses to ignore Ted Kennedy's warnings, Cheney will snatch control away from Bush while he is going through surgery, escalating a political crisis with Russia and causing the The End of the World as We Know It. In one of the endings if Bush drops Cheney, it's stated that this is still the case. Despite not even being VP anymore, Cheney continues to run the admin, kicking Bush out of his own office and keeping him entirely out of the loop. May be subverted since this ending is likely intended to be satirical exaggeration and probably doesn't represent real events within the mod. | |
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World War III | |
W. (Video Game) / int_6454966e | comment |
World War III: Narrowly averted, if you have a particularly hawkish presidency as Bush, you get the option to launch missile strikes against North Korea. Doing so results in outright war being only narrowly avoided through the intervention of the South Korean president. As this is followed by heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Bush at one point proposes dropping a nuke on North Korea, with the only thing stopping him being the intervention of Colin Powell. No longer averted in W+. Three candidates have paths leading to a third world war scenario between the US and Russia or the US and China, all of which give achievements. In Wesley Clark's Third World War path, his hawkish campaign is paired with Bush provocatively deploying ships to the Baltic and instructing the Taiwanese to seize some neighboring islands, leading to a three way world war scenario once Bush loses the election. In the centuries after WW3, the war comes to be known as the "Great Deluge". In the Ted Kennedy path, Bush takes provocative steps against Russia while emptying the administration of anyone who could tell Bush when to pump the breaks. Nuclear brinksmanship collapses into a civilization destroying war. Finally, in the Al Sharpton Path, Bush eliminates multiple missile ban treaties via aggressive foreign policy while pushing jingoism to a maximum and empowering Cheney in the administration. Cheney eventually seizes full control of the administration, leading to a nuclear exchange with Russia under his leadership. | |
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Inconsistent Spelling | |
W. (Video Game) / int_66c725b6 | comment |
Inconsistent Spelling: Because they never become household names in this universe, the names of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are spelled inconsistently across different endings, with the former's name sometimes written as "Usama Bin Ladin" and the latter as "Al-Qaida". In one of the Hillary Clinton endings, political blogger Andrew Sullivan even dares the reader to spell "al-Qaeda" without looking it up, showing how obscure it remains. Similarly, Muammar Gaddafi name is written in a different way each time it's mentioned. In Al Gore's Syria war ending, his name is spelled as "Qaddafi", "Kadafi", "Gaddahfi", "Qadafy" and "Gaddafi", all in the same text. | |
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Vice President Who? | |
W. (Video Game) / int_6aa5bcb8 | comment |
Vice President Who?: Averted with Cheney as always but played straight with Bill Frist, the Senate Minority Leader who becomes Bush's Vice President if Cheney retires or is forced to retire. Unlike Cheney, Frist doesn't appear to have a major say in the decision-making of the Bush administration and is only picked to be Bush's lifeline to congress. | |
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W. (Video Game) / int_6b05b601 | type |
Jerkass Has a Point | |
W. (Video Game) / int_6b05b601 | comment |
Jerkass Has a Point: If Bush barely manages to eke out a narrow victory against Robert Byrd, H.W. Bush will call Dubya lucky because the Democrats didn't decide to actually run a real presidential candidate and speculates that Hillary Clinton would wallop him in the general election if she were the candidate. Clinton is indeed the hardest candidate Bush can face, to say nothing of the secret route where Clinton runs with McCain. | |
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Guide Dang It! | |
W. (Video Game) / int_6ec989d8 | comment |
Guide Dang It!: It's possible to pass Social Security reform, Bush's tax cuts, and the AUMF, but it requires a specific set of choices, many of which aren't intuitive (such as allowing an investigation of Hastert's scandals, holding back on condemning Lawrence v. Texas, and pushing Cheney to find firmer intelligence on Iraq's WMDs rather than leaking to the New York Times). | |
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Dark Horse Victory | |
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Dark Horse Victory: Jesse Ventura can deadlock a close race between Bush and Gephardt if he wins in Minnesota and Alaska and thus deprives both candidates of the needed 270 electoral votes to win. If this happens after Bush maintained good enough relations with the Congress, Ventura can be unexpectedly elevated to the Presidency in the aftermath of the constitutional crisis and Bush's failed attempt to reclaim his office from Gephardt. | |
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WW3 | |
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In Wesley Clark's Third World War path, his hawkish campaign is paired with Bush provocatively deploying ships to the Baltic and instructing the Taiwanese to seize some neighboring islands, leading to a three way world war scenario once Bush loses the election. In the centuries after WW3, the war comes to be known as the "Great Deluge". | |
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There Is No Kill Like Overkill | |
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There Is No Kill Like Overkill: While Bush is capable of crushing most of his opponents by a comfortable margin with a good combination of choices, facing Robert Byrd gives him the opportunity of achieving one of the biggest landslides in The Campaign Trail's history. A combination of Byrd's unpopularity due to his past as a KKK member, anti-war tendencies and advanced age can allow Bush to win not only the fifty states, but also the heavily blue city of Washington D.C as well. Doing this would make him the first president since George Washington to win every single electoral vote. | |
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Resign in Protest | |
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Resign in Protest: If Bush doesn't invade Afghanistan and either blocks or fails to get congress to vote for invading Iraq, an embittered Dick Cheney resigns his Vice Presidential office in disappointment and is replaced by Bill Frist. | |
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Retraux | |
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Retraux: The mod's interface is made to resemble the websites of early 2000s, with cheesy pop up ads adding up to the nostalgic feel of the Bush-era Internet. | |
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Damn You, Muscle Memory! | |
W. (Video Game) / int_963086ce | comment |
Damn You, Muscle Memory!: If Al Gore wins the Democratic Party nomination for a rematch against Bush, the party colors on the election map will switch the other way around (with Bush states as blue and Gore states as red), alluding to the period when the party color identification didn't become standardized until after the first Bush-Gore election in 2000. Thus, it can come across as confusing at first to the player if they don't pay enough attention. | |
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Luck-Based Mission | |
W. (Video Game) / int_98b1dc8f | comment |
Winning against the Clinton/McCain unity ticket while running an all-out smear campaign against them is very hard, as the last minute reveal of Bush's role behind the obscene attacks against his opponents destroys much of the support he had up to that point. Even if you perfectly optimize your answers by the end, the actual outcome is still very much a Luck-Based Mission. | |
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Dirty Communists | |
W. (Video Game) / int_9c47b23b | comment |
In Wellstone's three wars ending where Bush invades Venezuela, Wellstone, while organizing a summit for peace in Latin America, strikes up a tenuous alliance with Fidel Castro, who promises to send assistance to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. This, quite obviously, sends Conservative America into a furious assault on Wellstone's "socialist agenda". | |
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Ascended Extra | |
W. (Video Game) / int_a65288e2 | comment |
Ascended Extra: Jesse Ventura in the original release merely appears as one of the many potential third-party candidates in the election, posing no threat against Dubya or the Democratic candidate and almost always falling short of the 5% popular vote needed for the Reform Party to gain federal funding. While this remains the same for nearly all other routes following the W.+ update, this changes if Richard Gephardt becomes the Democratic nominee. Channeling the rage of the anti-war movement who have now come to support his third-party candidacy, Ventura becomes a genuine threat to both Bush and Gephardt. He even has questions dedicated solely to stopping him like the Democratic candidate has, and his unexpected qualifying for the debates throws a wrench in Bush's plans. Dick Gephardt himself also counts. In the original release of W. Gephardt was merely speaker of the house and a representation of Congress' relationship with the president. In W+ Gephardt is now a possible opponent who takes office if Bush's domestic achievements are blocked by Congress, even going so far as to authorize an invasion of Iraq whether Bush wants to or not in order to create a national situation beneficial to his presidential run. | |
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General Ripper | |
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General Ripper: Wesley Clark is a retired general and an ultra-hawkish presidential candidate who attacks Bush for being too soft on the growing Axis of Evil between China, Russia, and Iran. He is also the only other President who can launch a World War 3, if he enters the office after Bush escalates tensions with both Russia and China amidst the high jingoist mood. Fittingly enough, his World War 3 achievement icon is a photo of the actual General Jack D. Ripper during his infamous Motive Rant. | |
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Odd Friendship | |
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Odd Friendship: The ending slide for Paul Wellstone defeating Bush with an ongoing war in Afghanistan depicts an unusually close relationship between President Wellstone (a left-wing academic and anti-war activist from the Sixties) and David Petraeus (a long-serving US Army general) as they together develop a new United States counterinsurgency doctrine that would shift its focus to low-intensity conflicts and psychological warfare. In Wellstone's three wars ending where Bush invades Venezuela, Wellstone, while organizing a summit for peace in Latin America, strikes up a tenuous alliance with Fidel Castro, who promises to send assistance to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. This, quite obviously, sends Conservative America into a furious assault on Wellstone's "socialist agenda". Robert Byrd, the ex-Klan member moderate (even leaning conservative) Southern Democrat, and his running mate, John Conyers, the left wing African American who had previously been active in the 1960s civil rights movement. | |
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Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass | |
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Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: While Robert Byrd is an almost nonagenarian politician with signs of senility who is despised by the leaders of both parties, he is still capable of using all his experience and knowledge from decades of serving in Congress to get his way. If he is elected President without Bush engaging in a third war, his political agenda to balance the budget by cutting the defense spending will be blocked by both parties, who threaten government shutdown as they vote to raise the debt ceiling. His solution? Mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin using a legislative loophole from a 1990's law to pay the debt, making it unnecessary to raise the debt ceiling and taking power away from his opposition. | |
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Oh, Crap! | |
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Oh, Crap!: Bush's reaction to Byrd gaining momentum, turning the election from a sure win against an old man into an actual competitive election. | |
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Apocalyptic Log | |
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Apocalyptic Log: The final post of the r/politics subreddit seen in the ending of W. where WW3 starts under Wesley Clark, functions as this. The manager of a Dominos Pizza branch in Washington D.C. notes the alarming number of pizzas being delivered to the Pentagon, and correctly predicts that this means something big is about to happen. The comments range from fear to outright denial, before ominously ending with a redditor commenting that his TV is doing that "weird emergency test sound". | |
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Face–Heel Turn | |
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Face–Heel Turn: The Democratic party's status as the face may be questionable, but they certainly can turn heel. In the Hillary/McCain path, one of the endings sees them embrace dogwhistling and birtherism against liberal opponent of the administration Barack Obama. | |
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Loophole Abuse | |
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Loophole Abuse: Byrd's solution in his ending to prevent a default as a hostile congress votes to raise the debt ceiling? While the Treasury is limited by law on how much paper money and gold, silver and copper coins it can circulate at once, an obscure law from the 1990s dictates there is no limit on how many platinum coins it can circulate, or on their value as well. Naturally, Byrd just prints a platinum coin worth 1 trillion to pay the debt. Minority Leader Rick Santorum even lampshades it. | |
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Your Days Are Numbered | |
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Your Days Are Numbered: Robert Byrd, added as an anti-war candidate during the W. + update, is the oldest serving senator in the mod at a whopping 87 years old and becomes the oldest person ever to be nominated. To say that Byrd's old age is the butt of many jokes is an understatement (Bush even quips about it when he visits the 175-year old tortoise Harriet during a diplomatic trip to Australia), and the so-called "Goldwater Rule" (an ethical rule preventing psychologists from diagnosing public figures without their consent) goes right out the window with many even openly speculating just how long Byrd can stay in office as POTUS before he inevitably dies. | |
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The Nicknamer | |
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The Nicknamer: Like in real life, George W. Bush is very fond of referring to the people around him by nicknames. Examples include Turd Blossom (Karl Rove), Pootie-Poot (Vladimir Putin), Vice (Dick Cheney), and of course Poppy (George H. W. Bush). | |
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Cloudcuckoolander | |
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Cloudcuckoolander: Although his calls for national security are resonant with the public, the rest of Gary Hart's presidential program, with his prolonged lectures about the ward republics organized along the Jeffersonian ideals, is incomprehensible to the regular Americans. | |
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Cassandra Truth | |
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Cassandra Truth: Bush can attack John Edwards for cheating on his cancer-ridden wife, but this ends up backfiring because his claim is seen as completely baseless by the public. The adultery scandal is in real life what ended Edwards' political career and what he is most known for today. | |
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Anti-Villain | |
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Anti-Villain: Despite being written from an anti-Bush liberal perspective that spares no expense in depicting Dubya as an arrogant "Well Done, Son" Guy warmonger, George W. Bush comes across as a blend of the Well-Intentioned (genuinely believes in keeping America safe from terrorism and staying true to conservative values) and Woobie (has been trying to gain his abusive father's approval his entire life) variants. | |
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Scare Campaign | |
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Scare Campaign: One route the player can take against the Clinton/McCain ticket is running a vicious campaign of personal smears and outright conspiracy theories about both candidates. It's also a Luck-Based Mission as the Bush campaign's involvement in the mudslinging gets exposed near the end, causing him to take a massive and usually fatal hit in the polls. There's even an achievement for pulling it off. | |
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In Spite of a Nail | |
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In Spite of a Nail: Despite 9/11 and The War on Terror never happening, it's still possible for the United States to end up at war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. | |
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Hypocrite | |
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Hypocrite: If Dubya chooses to start a third war in Syria, one of the reasons he gives for the toppling of Bashar Al-Assad is that he only became Syria's president due to his father. This coming from a "Well Done, Son" Guy. | |
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Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil | |
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Treachery Is a Special Kind of Evil: John McCain becomes a pariah among the right if he decides to share the presidential ticket with Hillary Clinton to unseat his fellow Republican from the White House. Bush himself can echo this hatred by launching a grotesquely vicious campaign against the pair and calling McCain "Komrade McLame". | |
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The End of the World as We Know It | |
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This is played completely straight in one route of the mod however. If Bush gives too much influence to Cheney, he will create a shadow administration using his network of political connections and control the Presidency behind Bush's back. If the player chooses to ignore Ted Kennedy's warnings, Cheney will snatch control away from Bush while he is going through surgery, escalating a political crisis with Russia and causing the The End of the World as We Know It. | |
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Historical Villain Upgrade | |
W. (Video Game) / int_e16217f8 | comment |
Historical Villain Upgrade: The mod depicts George H. W. Bush as a borderline abusive father who was greatly irritated by his son being president, to the point that no matter if or how he wins, even if you win all 50 states, he will still be disappointed in him in the ending. In real life, even with the inevitable rifts, Bush Sr. supported his son's presidency overall; his last words were even an "I love you too" directed at Dubya. | |
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Pop-Cultured Badass | |
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Pop-Cultured Badass: President Clark can invoke this image in his low jingoism ending by acknowledging the Harry Potter-themed online liberal activist group that regards the ex-SACEUR as the real life Albus Dumbledore and comparing Vladimir Putin to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named after the Russo-Georgian War. | |
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A Hero to His Hometown | |
W. (Video Game) / int_ebdb0292 | comment |
A Hero to His Hometown: This being a mod of the The New Campaign Trail, many presidential candidates are naturally strong in their home states and have a hard time losing them. Robert Byrd is popular in his home state of West Virginia despite his senility and anti-war stance, but has a hard time remaining competitive there even among the Democratic stronghold states. While Gephardt's nomination allows Jesse Ventura's presidential campaign to gain a lot of momentum, his home state of Minnesota is the only state (besides the third-party stronghold of Alaska) he can win for himself. Downplayed with Al Sharpton and his home state of New York. Sharpton polls well in New York despite his past controversies and involvement in the Tawana Brawley case (where a young black woman falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her)... but the state is well within the reach of the Bush campaign and Sharpton usually loses the state whenever Dubya pulls off a landslide. | |
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How the Mighty Have Fallen | |
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How the Mighty Have Fallen: There's an underlying sense that the 72-year-old Ted Kennedy is way past his prime, especially when compared to his youthful self in 1972: Peace With Honor. He's in poor health, a lot less mobile than he used to be and way more decrepit-looking than Bush. The only reason why he serves as Dubya's strongest opponent is because of his first term being a complete failure that ends with Bush firing large swathes of his cabinet. If Bush has a successful first term (minus the cabinet firings), Kennedy becomes significantly easier to deal with provided you know how to successfully deal with his campaign's attacks. | |
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Half-Baked Niceness | |
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Half-Baked Niceness: In the ending where Bush wins all 538 electoral votes against Robert Byrd, Poppy tersely compliments him on the historic nature (as they keep saying on TV) of his victory before starting a lecture about not letting it go to his head, finally driving it home that Dubya will never be able to make his father truly proud. | |
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