The president has quite a bit of ability to set priorities and funding levels and work assignments within the justice dept and intelligence agencies.

If he's a Republican, sure.

But Democrats always have their hands tied.

Bush did pretty much the exact opposite, actively refusing to use his leadership position to instruct the people who worked for him to do anything about the threat that they were telling him existed.

Bush was fixated, laser-like, on Iraq and looking for any excuse to invade. The Al Qaeda memos were treated as a distraction.

However, the theory that he just had a big "Stop Al Qaeda" button under his desk and refusee to press it is naive. There's no real policy Gore could have implemented to stop the 9/11 hijackings that would have come into force between January and September.

At best, he could have brought on a senior staffer who better coordinated between the NSA and the FBI. But even then, you're assuming the FBI would have been in the right place at the right time to act.

Gore, personally, wasn't going to do anything to change the outcome.