The world chuckled when the US Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether partially punctured ballot papers in Florida should be added to the final count in that state. It took a month to settle the issue in favour of George W. Bush when the court ruled that the disputed ballots should not be counted.
The financial markets could afford to look on in 2000 because the US federal budget was in surplus, the internet had yet to embark on its creative destruction of Western businesses and China was ranked an unthreatening sixth on the world income ladder, behind France. Not now. A delay of a week, let alone a month, would test everyone's patience. The US is surely out of tantrum credits after the standoff between congress and the White House over the debt ceiling almost triggered a second global financial crisis last year.
With the luxury of hindsight, the case of Bush v Gore marks the start of the US decline. By taking the litigious route, Republicans and Democrats elevated the conspiracy theorists in their respective bases above the swinging voter. This, in turn, accelerated the trend for petty partisanship on both sides.
In the 12 years since that amusing election, we've seen the Americans make fool of themselves each time they projected what they thought was military and economic strength. Iraq and the subprime mortgage are the reinforcing examples that historians will keep coming back to because of the roles they played in the eruptions of the US budget deficit and the first GFC.
But this isn't a morality play about the wrong guy for the times, Bush, winning in 2000.
Remember the loser, Al Gore, embarked on a second career as climate change worrier-in-chief. His excessive Hollywood advocacy triggered a toxic backlash from the sceptics.
The US continues to make the wrong call on each of the three big issues of the 21st century - the struggle between open and closed societies, the future of capitalism and the fragility of the environment - because it persists with the hubris of the quick fix.
A straight line can be drawn from Bush's shock and awe against Saddam Hussein to Obama's use of drones to target terrorists by remote control; from Bush's unfunded tax cuts for the rich to Obama's insistence that the middle class get their own tax cuts when the budget is in deficit; and from Bush's faith-based rejection of climate change to Obama's poll-driven inaction.
Romney can't break the American cycle of denial because he runs on the false assumption of continued American exceptionalism. Trust me, he says, I have experience in business. But he has inflated the entry price to the White House with his record-breaking spending on the campaign while devaluing the policy debate. He offers a tax cut skewed to higher-income earners but won't say what tax breaks he will remove to pay for it. Not even the detail-averse Tony Abbott would be so bold.
Obama, for his part, left the release of his second-term agenda for the final fortnight - a ploy the leave-it-to-later Julia Gillard would never think to try here.
The candidates are united by the fiction that the budget can be balanced without asking the middle class to pay more tax, and/or receive less in return from the government. They lecture China, the lender of first resort to the US, from a position of deficit.
Even the Greeks are not so deluded as to see their problems as solely the fault of Germany's manipulation of the euro.
To be fair to the Americans, Europe, Britain and even Australia share in the delusion that the West can return to normal if only the right scapegoat can be found from the fringe, or elite, of society. The idea that stability can be restored by punishing public servants and single mothers or higher-income earners and large corporations repeats across the First World. In Europe the blame game has even crossed national boundaries. While the Germans rightly insist that Greece and Spain accept responsibility for their bad loans, the price of 25 per cent unemployment is unacceptable from a moral perspective and plainly bad economics. Debts can't be repaid in recession, let alone depression.
Four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the West remains bewildered. The great financial deregulation experiment that shifted debt from the government to the household sector has ended with governments deeper in debt and households returning to thrift.
Before deregulation began in the early 1980s, the US budget deficit had reached a low of 6 per cent of gross domestic product, with receipts at 17.5 per cent and spending at 23.5 per cent. At the depths of the GFC in 2009, the budget deficit was almost double that amount - 10.1 per cent of GDP - with the tax system collecting about two points less at 15.1 per cent and the government giving back about two points more at 25.2 per cent.
The total federal debt was 34.7 per cent when Bush and Gore went to court in 2000. This year, it is 74.2 per cent of GDP and still rising. The only time it has been higher in US history was in the latter stages of World War II.
The financial markets might be able to excuse Europe's paralysis if the US political system were sharing the same hesitant path to recovery as the economy. But while Republicans and Democrats view each other as the real enemy, there can be no guarantee that the GFC is behind us.
The best that can be hoped for is that Obama and Romney see the bigger picture and their respective parties allow the winner to go to work without the threat of further gridlock.
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