Fran Lebowitz, essayist
I don't think there's anything that surprising about who won. Political races always seem to come down to an issue of character. We all wish we had so little competition. I have more competition when I'm alone.

I'm not surprised with what happened to John McCain when he started winning and I'm not surprised with what happened after. If it was all truly up to the people, it would most certainly have been McCain and it might even have been Bradley who won. But it was already locked in before time by the parties. And, in truth, there are groups of people, union people, churchgoers, people who belong to things. There are more of those people than most New Yorkers realize, and they all vote together.

Where I live, the voting booths were broken. The Republican ballot was very small -- I looked at the ballot, it was on the table -- and the delegates were very difficult to read. On the Democratic ballot the print was bigger, but the directions were very unclear. I asked one of the poll workers -- all of whom were between the age of 100 and 150 -- how many delegates we could vote for, and they said I could choose "all." I figured it all out the best I could, but I have no doubt that no one will ever open my paper ballot. And that makes me mad, since I made a special trip to go and I dont even like to go out in the daylight. And what am I paying taxes for, anyway, if we dont even get working voting booths?

I was very angry by it. I asked how long they had been broken, and they said they were delivered broken. Then they said they had been waiting all day for someone to come out and fix it. I dont know who is responsible for it -- I suspect it's Time-Warner Cable  but my first thought was, "This is deliberate. It's a [Midtown] precinct, a liberal voting precinct." I know, you think that seems old-fashioned. But women still get men to marry them by getting pregnant, and that seems old-fashioned to me, too.

I voted for Bill Bradley. But the whole Bill Bradley thing seemed totally invented. When there was hope for him at one point, it didn't seem real. Then people started reporting about how bad he was doing, how he was giving bad speeches. I mean, he's not Oscar Wilde, but we knew that. He's not that witty. It seemed like he was always the same. I prefer him to Gore because he's more liberal -- not that he's so liberal, everything has moved so far to the right that the most liberal politicians are really just Rockefeller Republicans. Bradley is just as far left as you can get, and at least he's not always talking only to people who are only worried about making more money.

I think there's a high chance Bush will get it. I think people, no matter what evidence is before the eyes of the public, always think the Republicans are better for the economy. Plus, he's just a filthy campaigner. And it works. Not because people like it, but because they seem totally unaware. Plus, he's boyish and that goes over well. It's a puppy-loving country, they give Oscars to child actors. They like that sort of thing.

The truth is, and I can say this because I'm not running for anything, the people are wrong. My fellow Americans are wrong. They're greedy, they're solipsistic, and it's all their fault. Maybe they get the candidates that they want. I don't.

Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum
I think the results were expected. I don't think they were any surprise. I think Bradley's campaign fizzled and collapsed because he tried to make himself the candidate to the left of Gore, and there really isn't much room there. I know he's skinny, but it's still hard to occupy a perch to the left of Gore. And that isn't the way this country is going, even in the Democratic party.

I think Gore's views are too left wing for America, and I don't think the American people ever voluntarily choose the left-wing or liberal candidate.

In the Republican party, I think that McCain, likewise, self-destructed. He certainly had an appeal that attracted people in the beginning. But his anger didn't come across well. People don't want to elect an angry candidate. His attacks on Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell boomeranged on him, and they didn't make any sense. Jerry Falwell hasn't said anything political in six or seven years.

It didn't just affect the religious right; it turned other people off. I don't think they want a candidate to make an all out attack on somebody's religion. I think that was very hurtful to him. I think there are many Republicans who voted for George Bush because they're just so turned off by McCain.

But McCain did have some good points. His anti-establishment campaign was attractive to a lot of people, but he just talked out of both sides of his mouth. He enjoyed the full support of the media establishment. Clearly he was a media candidate. At the same time, he was trying to portray himself as anti-establishment.

He attacked campaign finance methods and negative campaigning, both of which he was engaged in himself. He accepted all kinds of corporate money, and he engaged in negative campaigning. His negative attacks on Bush were much greater and more hurtful than Bush's negative attacks on McCain. So it just didn't ring true. I think I heard last night that the polling from California indicated that too. I thought that was very smart of the California voters.

I think McCain's attacks on Bush, such as attacking Bush as anti-Catholic, were much more hurtful than anything Bush said about McCain. When he was on "Meet the Press" last Sunday, and he said that he did not call Bush anti-Catholic, all I could see was his face morphing into Bill Clinton's saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Because it was clear that McCain was calling Bush anti-Catholic. He was just parsing the words like Clinton.

I'm hoping that Clinton fatigue will be the overriding issue. It's interesting how smart people like Ed Koch and [Patrick] Moynihan backed Bradley because they thought Gore was too tarred by Clinton. I think Bradley blew it by going left. I mean spending two weeks trying to argue who was more pro-abortion -- Gore or Bradley -- was just a dead-end argument. Its just really very difficult to be more pro-abortion than Al Gore. That argument just doesn't get you anywhere.

Another defect in McCain's campaign was trying to paint himself as a victim. Now we all know he was a victim in Vietnam, but we're a little tired of hearing how he's a victim in politics. It isn't a saleable image.

I really think that McCain and Bradley self-destructed. It wasn't so much a Bush-Gore win as it was they fizzled.

Ann Coulter, columnist for George magazine
I'm delighted that the media's candidate is going down in flames, though he held up well in Ben & Jerry country [Vermont]. The only reason, I think, that the media is refusing to call New York for Bush right now [Tuesday night, 10 p.m. EST] is that they just hate to see McCain lose.

Meanwhile, there's Bradley, who supposedly all of the smart Democrats I know really were behind. But I mean, look, this is Mr. 480 on his verbal SATs and he's considered the cerebral candidate. The New York Times gave him credit the other day for raising three important issues during the campaign: universal health care, gun control and campaign reform. I sat down and did a Lexis-Nexis search on each of those three issues and found that each one brought up more stories than [the service] could read. And I mean, what did Congress spend all it's time last year discussing anyway besides gun control and campaign finance reform? They didn't get anywhere, but still, that's all they were talking about. And did everybody suddenly forget Hillary's health care plan?

The greatest thing is that if Bush does lose Connecticut it will help him to hate people like his father. He doesn't need the support of moderate New England conservatives. We can survive without the support of Christine Todd Whitman and the precious suburban soccer moms. He needs to win big states like Texas and Florida. So it's great for Bush to lose the Northeast Republicans, he doesn't need them. And it's probably good for him that the Democrats seem to be spending so much time going after the black vote so hard, because they'll win them anyway, and then Bush can go after the Hispanic vote.

I also think Laura Bush is an asset to him. She's pretty, but there's also something nice and wholesome about her, where Cindy McCain, beyond being pretty, seems sort of predatory; I mean she's already stolen one womans husband: John McCain.

And finally [with Bush popular among women voters] I can appreciate the gender gap, now that it's working in our favor. Suddenly I understand the value of the "women's vote." Chicks like a cute, dumb guy. I also like Bush because he seems a little nastier than his father. That's my soft spot.

Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University and a contributing editor to the New Republic

It's over. The entire race for the nomination on both sides is done. The general election began last night. This was fated from the beginning -- I didn't think Bradley or McCain had much of a chance. You know, as George Washington Plunkett once said, "Reform is like morning glories, they look great early in the day and then they disappear." My good friend E.J. Dionne has talked about how the American people want the birth of an anti-party party; I just don't see it. I think what's happened is we're seeing regular politics restored to this country. The fact is, both Bradley and McCain lost. That's the outstanding fact. Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest. Republicans love Bush and Democrats love Gore. You ultimately have to win your party's voters in order to get the nomination in the primary system. Voil`.

The Democratic primaries have been far less bitter than the Republican primaries, so they enter this long phase between the primaries and the conventions much more united than the Republicans, who just went through a religious war. A lot of how things play out will depend on McCain. He launched what could become a real challenge to what the base of the Republican Party is doing. If he's good and bitter, he could make it very hard for Bush to create the center-right base he needs to contest the election against Gore and the center-left. The Democrats have created a center-left party. But the Republicans have a long way to go to re-create themselves as a center-right party. I think the primaries showed they can't do it. That's where most Americans fall, but the Republicans have moved far to the right. McCain could take his crusade forward, all the way to the convention, to demand a place at the table within the party as a price for not bolting. I don't think he'll do it, but it is a chip. He has a certain number of delegates he could hold on to in order to speak at the convention. He could also just release all of his delegates to Bush and say, "We fought a good fight and we will continue to fight down the line; but right now Bush is the winner and I don't want to mess up the party."

Overall, the Republican Party is much too far to the right. Bush's efforts to try to bring the party closer to the center really resulted in hell during the past three weeks because he had to embrace his party in order to win. He's going to try his damnedest to go back to the center, but will it wash? The damage has been done.

The Republicans are going to throw Gore's campaign finance abuses and Al Sharpton at him. Bush will say he's brave and offer tax cuts, but basically he's going to try to run against Clinton, who he thinks has been a disgrace. The media keeps telling him he's right, but they're wrong. Look what happened to Gore after he started embracing Clinton again: He kicked butt! I think Americans are going to accept Gore as the receptacle of everything they like about Clinton.

Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent and founder of Lucianne. com

I didn't think Bush was going to win quite as big as he did. But it would have been an unheard of miracle if McCain had pulled this off. I can certainly appreciate the moaning and groaning today, that a whole feast of column items and subjects is gone. The media was drunk on McCain -- he was such good copy. There's no such thing as a vacuum. Someone's going to fill it, but I don't know who it's going to be. It just looks kind of bleak right now. Politics has now become entertainment. Look how desperate we were when we tried to make something out of Trump, who was a joke. Even he knew it was a joke.

But I kind of miss McCain because he's really like watching a firecracker fuse burning. When's he going to go kaboom and blow up the landscape? It does look like that religious-right stuff backfired on him. When it was happening, it was exhilarating, it was something new, somebody being tough. We're totally wimped out now, there are no men around. It's scary. McCain was manly, I don't know how much of a man he was. You'd have to be married to him or date him for a long time to know that. But he certainly was tough-minded, and people liked that. But he picked on two pathetic old toothless tigers -- I mean Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are a threat? They're not scary, they're just dull. There are better people to pick on. [They're just a threat to Tinky Winky] and the handbag business.

Bush is either going to flop or fly. I hope he's a quick learner because he's got a lot to learn -- including learning to speak the English language. Today, there's a whole e-mail of his quotes going around and it's hilarious. I'm a good conservative, so I'm not going to pile on by sending it to you. He has to stop trying to please everybody.

Just the thought of this much more time having to listen to Gore ... I think we're in Gore fatigue now, and the man hasn't even been elected. It seems like he's been running and shouting forever, and he's growing breasts, which I find amazing. Look at his T-shirts. I know they're supposed to be pecs or abs or whatever those are, but it looks odd. He's so boring. [But] Tipper didn't slap back the Prozac [last night] and she was bouncy and cute and she's gained a little weight and she looks good. Of the whole crowd, I like Tipper the best. She's a good person.

Joseph Nye, dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

The primary season was too early, which means the whole election is going to be too long. People are going to get a little bit tired of it, so that some of the early participation may dwindle a bit as Bush and Gore beat up on each other. So I think that the front end loading of it essentially got excitement and participation at the beginning, but it may be at the cost of participation later on.

The Republicans may want to rethink open primaries. The race with John McCain cost him a lot more than $65 million. McCain was able to push Bush out of the center and more to the right. And that may cost Bush the general election.

If you believe the American public opinion forms a bell-shaped curve with most people in the center, but that the party activists are out on the wings, left and right for the two parties, the interesting effect of the primaries is that Bradley pushed Gore toward the center, which positions him for the general election. McCain pushed Bush toward the right, which pushes him out of where he wants to be for the general election. So I think the Republicans may want to rethink open primaries in the sense of somebody comes in and pushes the preferred candidate to the right. This has hurt, not helped.

The Republicans expected a coronation and they got a fight. And the fight they got positioned their candidate the wrong way. I think that what Bush had going for him in the early days was that he was electable. Therefore when he lost early, it undercut what he had going for him.

It's worth noticing that Gore, who was widely viewed as the Democratic candidate early on, was not hurt by being chosen early. If anything, the challenge from Bradley was an enormous help. The conventional wisdom six months ago was that Gore couldn't win. The word "boring" and Gore were always used together. And within six months, that's vanished. So being an early favorite need not be a bad thing. But in both cases, a competition was better than a coronation. But the competition did more for Gore than it did for Bush.

Bradley didn't help on issues like gays in the military, but other issues like health care, a very popular issue, Gore was able to position himself as practical. He was able to say "I agree with Bradley that this is a top issue, but I have a practical way to do it and he doesn't." And that was one of the major issues that they debated, and that positioned Gore as a pragmatic New Democrat, not the old fashioned liberal Democrat who thinks "solve it all at once."

I think that Gore wants the education issue, but I'm not sure he's been able to capture it. I think it's too early to tell on that one. We have to listen to the Bush-Gore debate before we can answer that.

I think Bush is unlikely to accept [Gore's offer of twice weekly debates]. Gore is a polished debater with a lot of experience. Bush is much less so.

If Bush and Gore are out campaigning, slamming each other every day, I think there could be the sort of "a plague on both their houses" phenomenon. Bush needs to find some ways to keep in the public eye without having people get tired of him. Maybe he'll give attention to some state issues. I think he'll do some more foreign travel. This is one of the areas where he hasn't got a lot of experience, where he has to position himself for November. And it gets him a press corp that flies with him, that gets him attention when he meets with foreign leaders and it's non-confrontational. It doesn't lead to that public reaction of "a plague on both your houses." So I would suspect that -- obviously there will be some Austin and some public statements -- but I suspect there's also going to be a considerable bit of foreign travel. He also has to replenish his coffers. I think that the same people who gave him the massive war chest for the primaries will come back and give more.

Some McCain voters will go to Bush. Some were Reform voters in the last election and will go to whatever the Reform outcome is. And some of them will vote for Gore, and some of them will sit on their hands. The big question is what are the proportions of those four options. A lot of it will depend on how McCain bows out, and we haven't seen that yet. It's unlikely that McCain will run as a third-party candidate, but you never know. The nice thing about this election is that it's all made us a bit more humble about these predictions.

I think that it's unlikely that Elizabeth Dole will be the vice presidential nominee. I think the best option would be if Bush could persuade McCain to do it. But I don't think that's likely. If not, then the idea of breaking the Democratic gender gap advantage has something to be said for it. I think Bush is going to need to do something to push him back to the center and into a Gore constituency. Another brilliant coup would be to persuade Colin Powell that he should do it, but that also seems unlikely.

Bush doesn't want to be overshadowed [by his running mate], but he can't afford to do what his father did and go for a Dan Quayle. So I think he has to go with someone who makes the statement that, yes, he is the "compassionate conservative" at the center of the party, and who is the core constituency and who can play the character issue.

Bush may be vulnerable on that issue, particularly after the way he ran this last campaign, not even talking about the ancient history. I'm talking about the recent Wyly ads, the breast cancer ads, Bob Jones and so on.

I think that the biggest thing is the economy. If the economy stays strong, then most of the political scientists would tell you that Gore should win. But if the economy turns sour, then the other issues become swing issues. Keep an eye on the economy.

David Horowitz, Salon columnist

Now begins the general election campaign. Gore has buried Bradley from one end of the country to the other. The Republican contest is closer, but it is all but over anyway. Bush has won in the South and he has won in the North, in the East and in the West. He has taken conservative southern states like South Carolina and liberal northern states like Maine. He has won a landslide in the industrial heartland of Ohio, and he has prevailed by a wide margin in the New South state of Georgia. Among Republican voters in every state he has dominated Sen. McCain as thoroughly as Gore has Bradley. It is only among independents and Democrats that Bush has failed to do as well.

Looking ahead to the general campaign there are a number of nice omens for Republicans early on this Super Tuesday. In Ohio, 75 percent of the votes cast overall were cast for Republican candidates. In California, early exit polls showed that 58 percent of independents cast their votes for Bush and McCain while only 31 percent cast their votes for Bradley and Gore. Will it be Bush-McCain versus Gore-Bradley in November? After tonight, the odds are that it will.

Andrew Sullivan, columnist for the New York Times Magazine and author of "Love Undetectable"

McCain is not finished as a national figure or as a senator or as someone who will now wield a great deal of power in determining the success or failure of the Bush ticket. My guess is he won't run as a third-party candidate but then I don't know how mad he is about Bush's campaign. He'd make a formidable Reform candidate. The roughly 30-30-30 split in California strikes me as a pretty good indicator of the three parties that now informally exist in America. [And] With "W." in the race, Gore will have to do very little to energize the base. It will be energized.

[To regain his compassion, Bush] will appear with every black baby he can find. He'll meet with the Log Cabin Republicans. He'll speak Spanish. And so on. He's still the hard-right candidate. [The religious right] will put up with him because he's all they've got; and, besides, they know he's really one of them. If they tolerated his dad, they can surely tolerate him.

The fact that almost 40 percent of Californians backed equal marriage rights does not seem to me like a smashing victory for the religious right. This, after all, is their strongest issue. Without Latinos, they would have been in deep trouble; and I don't think that, apart from gay-bashing, they have many other issues to appeal to the Latino population. So they won't be resurgent; although a Bush victory will doubtless solidify their hold on the GOP. He's their man.

God help us [if Dole is on the ticket]. She's even more of a boob than he is. She had nothing to say last year, nothing. The idea that she would help the gender gap is somewhat insulting to women.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Government Studies

We're back to the same boring choice we had in the beginning. It will get unboring fast because Pat Buchanan will take full advantage of this. The question is can the Republicans win with all the bigot ground taken? I don't know the answer to that. There's also a bigot faction in the Democratic Party, the Al Sharptons who use racial language to their advantage. The difference is that I never believed that they control very many votes, whereas Buchanan can attrack the nuts in large proportions.

Some of the McCain folks are angry and some of the Bradley voters are equally angry. I'm at an academic institution and 92 percent of the Democrats here support Bradley. There just is not support for Gore. They don't like him, they're surprisingly critical of Clinton and the scandals, and they can't stand Bush. So it got down to Bradley and McCain, and they favored Bradley, for party identification purposes, over McCain.

They're depressed this morning, they're angry, they're upset they're hoping that someone who is acceptable and mainstream jumps into the campaign. And there are millions of people out there like that.

There are two openings. Remember, Bradley was further to the left than Gore, so there's an opening to the left. If Ralph Nader still had the kind of credibility that he had in the '60s and '70s, he would be dangerous to the Democratic Party. And maybe he still will be. Maybe in California, in a close race, he can take away enough Democratic votes to tip the election. But no one is talking about that. Maybe they ought to be. The Bradley folks I know are split, but a sizable number of Bradley voters are not voting for Gore. They are looking for an alternative.

The McCain middle includes moderate conservatives in the Republican Party, independent moderates, and even some moderate Democrats. They also feel hopeless this morning. They are looking for an alternative. The exit polls say a third of them are voting for Gore. I suppose that means two-thirds are voting for Bush or Buchanan.

But these exit polls --and I've seen them every cycle since they started -- the immediate exit poll results are not indicative of what will happen in November. They're simply an indication of how much anger there is. And I think that it's a significant figure. If 35 percent of the McCain voters say they will vote for Gore, well 35 percent of his voters were not Democrats. Maybe 8 or 10 percent of the voters were Democrats. Even if you double that, the other percentage has to be coming from disgruntled liberal Republicans and moderate-to-liberal Independents.

What politicians say yesterday has only a passing acquaintance with what they do today. I don't think McCain would run as a Reform or an Independent candidate. But if John McCain is hated by the Republicans, what's he doing there? If I were in an institution where most of my colleagues hated me, I'd go somewhere else. My guess is a lot of people will ask, "Why should he stay with people who don't appreciate what he has to offer?"

Of course, he wouldn't run as a Democrat but it's easy to see him become an independent. He is by nature an independent. He's a maverick, he's a populist, he's one of a kind. People like him never fit in parties. McCain was created by a unique set of genes and a unique set of circumstances that brought out the courage and the toughness in him. Did the media like him and help him along? Of course! Is the pope Catholic?

The media overwhelmingly loved him and showed their bias repeatedly. So what else is new? That didn't help Bruce Babbit. So why did McCain get further than Babbit? Because there was something there, and because McCain connected with average people. I'm not speaking for McCain, and he would tell you that he doesn't like me. But you have to give him his due.

My guess is that both Bush and McCain are strongly disinclined to pursue [having McCain as a running mate]. Vice presidents are toadies, and they have to have a personality that helps them to be a toady. Gore is perfect. George Bush senior was perfect. They -- just by nature -- were toadies.

And I think people sense that about Gore. He may win, but he will never be truly respected because people sense that there is a phoniness, a fakeness to him, that he is not his own man, that he will do or say anything to get where he is going.

As a vice president, Elizabeth Dole -- she's never been elected to public office -- can't overshadow Bush, who has been elected twice in a major state. Yet she adds all the dimensions that we know about. [Pennsylvania Gov.] Tom Ridge -- who I think is very high up on the list -- is governor of the only large Northeastern state available to the Republicans. And the only way it's available is with Ridge on the ticket. That's one you take out of the Democratic column and into the Republican column, so that's a double hit. Thirdly, he's Roman Catholic. That helps with the Catholic problem. Fourthly, he's a Vietnam War hero. Who does that remind you of? Fifth, he's kept good relations with John McCain. So I think Ridge makes a heck of a lot of sense. But so does Elizabeth Dole. Those two to me make more sense than anybody.

On the Democratic side, everybody says Feinstein. I just don't believe it. If a Democrat can't carry California on his own, then he shouldn't be running, and I think Gore can. He proved it yesterday. I think Bill Richardson makes more sense because Bush actually does have a plan for winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. That really is a danger to the Democrats. The other choice in this race -- and it seems really boring -- but you talk about a candidate who won't show up Al Gore? Evan Bayh [former Gov.] of Indiana. He picks up Indiana, which he never would otherwise. The entire campaign will be in Ohio, Illinois and Michigan. It's going to come down to the same states that it did in '96 and '92. We're going to trying to make it interesting, but we're still running the same election.

Bush lost more than money in his race with McCain. He lost the air of inevitability. He's been shown to be a less than impressive debater, not all that quick on his feet, there are just so many things. Sure, many of these things would have been revealed in the general election. But they were revealed in a way that made them even more damaging for Bush. They were revealed early and harshly.

I tend to want to say Gore is the favorite. What keeps me from doing that is that Gore is so unimpressive and so unattractive. There are a whole lot of people who ought to be for him who are just saying "oh no."