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next to no policy impact apart from a sympathy bump in Republican approval ratings for a few months at most.
A more interesting scenario would have been if Gore had won, then been killed, in which case Lieberman would become president, and we would be exactly where we are today--it just might have taken a bit longer to get here.
Even the attempted assassination of Reagan had more impact than a hypothetical one of Bush would. As Reagan was recovering, Papa Bush was putting him imprimatur on foreign policy and even started running some of the covert ops from the basement, like Iran Contra.
Apart from that, I can't think of too many presidents whose deaths would make a radical difference after FDR and maybe JFK. If FDR had died while Wallace was vice president, the New Deal might have been reinforced for at least another term or so, and therefore might have been more hardened to withstand the decades of attacks from the royalist right. Conversely, if FDR had lived after his presidency and into the 1950s, it's hard to imagine McCarthyism getting off the ground if our most beloved and articulate president was around to explain and defend his policies and appointments attack dogs like McCarthy called traitorous.
I suppose if Ike had died in office, Nixon would have brought McCarthyism all the way into the Oval Office. Ike kept it at least at arm's length.
If Nixon had died during his first term, we would have avoided Watergate, but Agnew would have had different sorts of problems.
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