The presidential transition of 2008-9 was the last calm transition of power the nation would know until the present. Edwards, despite being the victim of a dirty campaign and being wiped out on a level not seen since '84, would be cordial to Santorum, something we should remember in these divisive times. Santorum, despite his later mistakes, was cordial in turn to Edwards and resisted the calls of radical right voices to move to prosecute hated members of the Edwards administration like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was chosen as the political sacrifice for the scandal that erupted when the strategy of bribing moderate Sunni leaders in Iraq was brought to widespread public attention by Rush Limbaugh. Santorum instead asked Republicans to pray for the country, and remember that Democrats were fellow Americans too.
Santorum was of course immediately faced with the enormity of the challenges facing him before his ascension to the Oval Office, from the economic catastrophe, to the Sudan and Afghanistan wars, illegal immigration, and social/racial divisions exacerbated in the Cheney and Edwards years by the peace movement, the Assassination of Jesse Jackson, Hurricane Katrina, the New York Riots, and now the unequal effects of the banking crisis. His response was to rapidly pick out his cabinet members so the Republican House and Senate could pass them with due haste; while also making sure to balance the evangelical wing of the party with the neoconservatives who wanted to focus more on business and foreign affairs than culture war. As such Santorum picked John McCain, the archetypical neocon, as his Secretary of State, and former Cheney administration National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of Defense to appease their wing of the party, while keeping out the most unpopular figures from the Cheney years like Donald Rumsfeld who never recovered from the Abu Gharib Scandal. In positions related to the domestic policies he would promote those closer to himself ideologically; evangelical or otherwise religiously conservative culture warriors like Newt Gingrich for Secretary of the Treasury, Mitt Romney as Attorney General, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council as Secretary of Education.
Santorum's inaugural address was uneventful, his speech was relatively short and only notable due to mentions of faith and God being more numerous and more explicitly the Christian faith and the Christian God. Upon finishing he would work to make his first 100 days a blitz of activity with his first priority being the economy....
...The American Economic Freedom and Opportunity Act would pass rapidly with Republican and Democratic support by February 20th, 2009 moving to lower taxes on new businesses as well as large corporations while increasing funding for the military, homeland security, law enforcement, infrastructure, and energy. Democratic proposals to increase funding in education, housing, and health and to at least temporarily expand unemployment benefits were shot down by fiscal hawks and moral majority supporters who feared that welfare recipients would refuse to go back to work. Still, the stimulus was initially popular as giving the appearance of activity and for cutting taxes in the short term...
...Overall Santorum would stay focused on the economy and cultural issues in his first few months in office. He delegated foreign affairs away to his cabinet as much as possible in a move that many Americans appreciated, exhausted as they were by the economic situation they couldn't be bothered to care about America's wars in the Middle East as much as they had in the fever pitch of the Cheney years and the doldrums of the Edwards administration. Although a majority of Americans still saw the Iraq War as a success,* they simply did not care as much about Islamic terrorists when they couldn't keep a roof over their heads, and Afghanistan and Sudan were viewed much more dubiously by the public when they could distinguish them at all as being separate from each other and Iraq.
Instead increasing calls were going out for the heads of the business leaders who were blamed for the recession in the first place. At least on the radical left that was; on the right the focus was shifting from the Middle East towards the threats of gay marriage, the national debt, youth crime, and illegal immigration from Mexico. Increasingly people were seeing their enemies as being at home with memories of 9/11 and other terror attacks not going away, but becoming less vivid.
If this had continued on its own Santorum likely would have been remembered as a flawed president, but not a especially heinous one. But instead of being remembered for class war or culture war the 5/13 Attacks in Saudi Arabia would end up making Santorum be remembered for the Third Phase of the War on Terror after Cheney's unfettered neoconservatism and Edwards's liberalism...
- Tomas Friedman's "What the Hell Happened to the Moderates? A History of the Last Twenty Years and Four Administrations."
...
Online group "Anonymous" leaks records of illegal dealings by Swiss banking corporation Julius Baer to WikiLeaks.
- ABC News; December 5th, 2008.**
Massive truck bomb kills Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and President Asif Ali Zardari along with ministers of interior and law.
- NDTV; December 18th, 2008.***
Several American and European military and intelligence officials killed in Islamabad Bombing.
- BBC; December 19th, 2008.
Pakistan launches manhunt in Islamabad; emergency elections to be held in early 2009.
- PBS Newswire; December 22nd, 2008.
Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir executed by Sudanese court in Khartoum.
- CBS News; December 27th, 2008.
Mass shooting at Berkley Campus kills 23; shooter takes own life.
- NBC News; January 18th, 2009.****
"The Berkley shooting has shocked the nation to its core; when I am president we will move hard to address the factors that have corrupted our youth into taking such disgusting actions. I will look into changing federal rules on moving obscene content on the internet and the distribution of violent media, including video games, that police are saying may have helped to inspire this shocking shooting."
- President Elect Rick Santorum to the press on January 19th, 2009.
"The Berkley shooter was a young white male who posted on the internet about how much he hated women, and yet we aren't hearing about him being a terrorist from the media. Instead its all about violent video games, funny how that works."
- Cenk Uyghur on The Young Turks; circa January 20th, 2009.
Santorum's Inaugural Address Seeks To Comfort A Nation In Deep Spiritual Crisis.
- The American Conservative; January 22nd, 2009.
Santorum moves to push stimulus through congress and senate.
- MSNBC; January 28th, 2009.
"The economy doesn't need big government spending, the market needs the government to get out of the way so it can correct itself."
- Rand Paul on CSPAN; February 7th, 2009.
Stimulus Bill Passes.
- Reuters; February 20th, 2009.
Hacker group "Anonymous" releases recordings of politicians involved in the Peru Oil Scandal to WikiLeaks.
- RT; February 25th, 2009.
FBI draws attention to threat posed by "crust punk" anarchist extremists in memo.
- CNBC; March 1st, 2009.
Gaddafi denies that Libya is giving arms to Sudanese terrorists.
- CNN; March 4th, 2009.
Santorum reportedly snubs Iceland's lesbian Prime Minister at NATO meeting in London.
- The Daily Mail; March 20th, 2009.
Pakistan to schedule elections for June as some fear the military is reluctant to give up power.
- BBC; March 24th, 2009.
New internet regulation to restrict distribution of pornography and violent video games passes house and senate.
- Fox News; April 2nd, 2009.
"At a time when our economy is in crisis Dick Santorum wants us to focus on the true threat to this nation; internet porn and violent video games. The Texas hayseed is censoring our media because he can, he knows that porn and video games didn't cause the Berkley shooting, those only cause virginity! But he wants to censor us because his magic book told him to, and the only people who opposed this bill were the progressive moonbats among the Democrats and the libertarian Republicans."
- Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher; April 5th, 2009.
...
*The Iraq War OTL lost majority support in 2005. Here the Iraqi Civil War never gets as intense with Edwards doing the Surge earlier and also adopting the strategy of reaching out to (and bribing) moderate Sunni leaders to turn on Al Qaeda. As such Iraq seems like a bigger success past 2005 while under Cheney it seemed like a bigger failure than Iraq in 2004 OTL due to a series of terrorist operations that were successful in this timeline but not OTL. However this was blamed on Cheney rather than on the Iraq War itself being a monstrous crime.
**I'm moving some OTL Anonymous accomplishments around in the timeline. This will be important later.
***Based on a OTL attempt to decapitate the Pakistani civilian government that was nearly successful.
****The Virginia Tech Shooting was butterflied but something similar has taken its place.
