Was there still too much pepper in Gore’s punch? Or did Bush squander the gains he made in the second round? For Salon’s presidential debate panel, it was a split decision.

Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University

For anyone with an open eye and ear, Al Gore revealed himself to be an intelligent, thorough and confident figure who one could imagine — without much difficulty — mastering the Oval Office. And George W. Bush revealed himself to be a shambling, evasive babbler. Now it’s evident that there are a substantial number of Americans, especially in the contested states, who want their president stupid. If there are enough of those people, then Bush won this debate by losing it, by demonstrating his hapless incompetence and almost daffy incapacity. If the majority of the American public is unstampeded by the argument that this empty-headed jokester is a “uniter and not a divider,” then they will see that Al Gore is up to the task of governing, and W. should return to running ball teams, especially with public subsidy.

I’m aghast at the shallowness and sheer incompetence of the man. I was trying to figure out how he could have been so dopey, and I’m wondering if he got some disturbing news or a punch in the head before the debate, because he struck me as surprisingly feeble and diminished. He couldn’t budge from his script, and he seemed like a drugged Stepford husband.

That this man could be close to the presidency is appalling beyond words. How any serious person could find him persuasive is beyond me. I think the mindless repetition of Republican pieties is what he has to offer. And if there are enough Republicans out there who think intoning “tax and spend, tax and spend” is the answer to the problems of the modern world, then Bush wins. And God help us all.

Stanley Crouch, critic and author of “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome”

It might be possible to have a more boring debate than was had between Al Gore and George W. Bush this time around, but I can’t actually imagine it. The biggest problem is in the favor of the Democrats because the issues facing the nation do not have much dramatic appeal although, untended, they could become catastrophic in the future. How does one make expensive prescription drugs or low-performing public schools or tax cuts or Medicare or extraordinary vulgarity in popular culture sufficiently dramatic to create interest, suspense and curiosity in an audience? Well, there might be a way to do so, but neither man figured that out.

Gore seemed intent on becoming more ardent this time around but seemed phony and only too willing to ignore the rules that he and Bush had agreed upon if they got in his way. On the other hand, Bush came off well more often than not but seemed to have memorized his answers to questions about subjects such as the Middle East, which resulted in his response using almost exactly the same words heard in the second debate when the same issue came up.

That makes the exclusion of Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan even more unfortunate. Both would have heated matters up, attacked policies vehemently and brought to the table a whole other body of ideas and information. Nader, for one, would have accused both of selling out to the powerful, and would have brought serious environmental charges against the Clinton administration. He would have called into question policies both national and international. So, in his way, would have Buchanan. Immigration would have been an issue and its effect on American workers, as well as trading policies.

So, once more, the public has been cheated out of hearing a fiery and substantial debate. But that lack of fire is something we have become accustomed to, sometimes mistaking it for ease. But, as one great American said so many years ago, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Ann Coulter, columnist for George magazine

Despite the media propaganda machine trying to hypnotize the American people into believing George Bush is a nincompoop and Al Gore is a genius, the Dope keeps performing well while the Intellectual Colossus keeps frightening small children. Even the media is starting to lose its confidence, and is not so persuasive in announcing each successive debate a “draw.” (What exactly would have to happen in these debates for Dan Rather to proclaim Bush the winner?)

In the first debate, Gore was insufferable — constantly interrupting to get in just “one more” point, heaving loud sighs, hogging airtime and reminding the teacher that she forgot to assign homework. (To say nothing of launching all-new whoppers about his heroic feats, which — given his claim to have invented the Internet and to have been the inspiration for “Love Story” — was roughly equivalent to Bush’s having gotten the name of a major country wrong.)

By the second debate, Gore had transformed himself. No longer the know-it-all brown-noser, Gore had miraculously become Norman Bates in the last scene of “Psycho.” He was so tightly wound for that you could almost hear him thinking to himself, “I hope they are watching; they will see, they will see and say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even hurt a fly.’”

So naturally, the entire nation was on tenterhooks to see what weirdness Gore would unleash at the final presidential debate. The answer is: Tracy Flick from the movie “Election.” Gore’s various personalities are like the unhappy families described by Tolstoy: He’s always weird, but he’s weird in different ways.

One of the Populist Pinocchio’s more self-important boasts was this: “I have helped to … pay down the debt.” If this is true, we’re paying our vice presidents too much. Is Gore claiming that he was writing trillion-dollar checks on his personal checking account to help pay down the debt?

But best of all, Gore prefaced his claim to have been funding the federal government for the past eight years with this explicit disclaimer: “I’m not just saying this; I’m not just talking.” It’s nice that he’s at least trying to give us advance warning when he’s not lying. Too bad he was lying. The heaving sighs are gone, but Fibber McGee will not be repressed.

Roger Ebert, film critic

Gore creamed Bush.

Gore was informed, articulate, on topic and persuasive. Bush was vague, rambling, hesitant. Bush’s Johnny Carson nice-guy act wore out. Gore finally found the balance between calm and conviction.

Bush did not seem like a man whose attention was fully engaged, as when he assured the family farmer his agriculture plan was to “feed the world.” Or when he said “insurance” was “a Washington term.”

One self-described middle-class, unmarried woman stood up and asked how each candidate’s tax plan would help her. Gore replied with specifics. Bush’s answer weirdly drifted to his plans for a strong military.

Bush lacked specifics. He talked in platitudes. Gore used platitudes, too, but moved on to specifics. When Bush tried to cite facts, as in his explanation of his tax plan, he didn’t inspire confidence that he understood what he was talking about. I knew what he was trying to say about tax rates for the wealthy because I’d read articles advising him on how he should address that issue. But he wasn’t able to say it clearly.

Bush avoided specifics in replying to the African-American woman who asked about diversity and affirmative action; you wouldn’t learn from his answer that race had anything to do with the subject. He was even less able to deal with Gore’s crossfire. Bush tried to equate “affirmative action” with “quotas.” Gore pointed out that quotas are illegal. Bush responded, “if affirmative action means what I just said I was for, I’m for it.” It does not mean that, Gore said, asking how Bush stood on affirmative action as it has been defined by the Supreme Court. Did Bush know what the court had said? He only lamely repeated himself. Jim Lehrer reprimanded Gore for talking out of turn, which was fair enough, but didn’t give Bush an opportunity to elaborate — for which the governor must have been thankful.

Gore had command of facts and issues; he was sure of himself. With Bush, I had the feeling there was little left unsaid, that he was spinning his wheels trying to get to the two-minute mark. He reminded me of a student who had crammed for the exam, knew the names and the terms, but didn’t deeply understand them — who was substituting generalizations for answers.

Gore won the debate. More to the point, Bush did not demonstrate competence. Gore seemed presidential. Bush did not.

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at the New Republic, has a new Web site, www.andrewsullivan.com

Tougher one to call, this one, but I give it to Bush by a small margin. Gore did much better than before. He made one very telling point, illustrating the hole in W.’s Social Security proposals.

He also seemed like he’d had a testosterone shot or something. Man, the first time he stood up I thought he was going to clock Bush. But there was also something oddly strained about his machismo. He strutted around the stage, blocking Bush’s view, trying to intimidate him physically. He came across as a bit of a bully: an Alpha Male who fears he isn’t. Bush, in contrast, seemed more relaxed, more passive, more secure in his masculinity. He flubbed his chance — again! — to defend his tax proposals, and looked tired to me. I bet the result is that Gore upped his numbers among men but lost more among women.

Three things linger in the mind. First, Gore physically dominated, using the format to press home his height advantage. This shouldn’t matter, but it does. The taller candidate almost always wins. Second, Bush related to people better. I was particularly struck by his answer to Leo Anderson, the black guy who asked about the death penalty. Like Leo, I’d also been unnerved by the callowness of Bush’s death penalty answer in the previous debate. But W’s eye contact this time, his somberness and appearance of depth in his answer almost wiped last week’s smug smirk from my memory. It was also encouraging that he seemed completely at ease with an African-American.

Third, Gore cheated. He walked around to gain advantage, he ran over his time, he violated the rules which bar the candidates from asking direct questions of each other and he often used the questions as a platform to go off on another spiel. This was really irritating. I bet a lot of viewers objected to these tactics. They seemed calculated and arch, and played into deeper worries about his character.

Strategically, Gore succeeded in proving he’ll spend more money on more people, which — in this pander-thon — may well count for something. He disinterred the Shrummery of the convention and rallied his base. Similarly, Bush played the not-from-Washington card well, and adequately tagged Gore as a big spender. Gore seemed to attack more; Bush seemed to conciliate more.

Both did well in their markedly different ways, which means Bush won, since he’s already ahead. He even made me smile at times, whereas Gore occasionally made me wince. I realized as the debate proceeded that I can hardly bear the thought of Gore patrolling the culture for four more years. I don’t particularly like Bush, but I really can’t stand Gore. I have a feeling I’m not alone.

Virginia Postrel, editor-at-large of Reason magazine and the author of “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress”

The most memorable moment of the debate was one that didn’t happen. A woman asked Al Gore how his tax cut proposal would affect her as a middle-class, 34-year-old single woman with no dependents. The vice president responded with a litany of if-then statements: IF you put money in a savings account, IF you go to school, IF you have an elderly parent or grandparent you’re taking care of, THEN have I got a deal for you. Most middle-class, 34-year-old single women with no dependents just don’t meet most of Gore’s criteria for good behavior. They get nothing from his tax cut.

It was a perfect setup for George W. Bush’s successful ideological theme: that he trusts people to make decisions about their own lives, and believes government shouldn’t play favorites, while Gore wants to use the tax code and other programs for behavior modification. “If, if, if,” he could have said, “if and only if you do just what the vice president thinks you should do, then you’ll get some of your hard-earned money back. Under my plan, you will get tax relief, with no strings attached. I believe everyone who pays taxes should get some of the government’s overcharge back. It’s your money. And if you need to spend it on a new car, or to fix up your apartment, or to go shopping for a new wardrobe, that’s your business, not the government’s. You know better than I do what’s best for you. I respect your right and responsibility to run your own life, and so do my policies.”

But Bush blew it. As the vice president’s campaign might say, he babbled — talking first about how Gore’s savings subsidies would bust the budget, then for some bizarre reason bringing up Medicare and promising that we’ll live in a peaceful world with more educated citizens if he gets elected. Sandwiched in between these random promises was what should have been the lead — “You are going to get tax relief under my plan” — with no follow-up explanation. Bush missed his moment, and the public discussion is the poorer for it.

Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum

I was very pleased with the way Bush presented himself. He was relaxed and informed, and made a very good impression. And the differences between the candidates were made clear. Bush wants to give everyone a tax cut, while Gore is for bigger government. Bush doesn’t want to commit American troops unless we have a national interest at stake, and that’s quite a change from the Clinton-Gore policy.

I was really turned off by the person who asked what the government should do about people who won’t take an interest in their children’s education. I don’t think that’s the government’s job. That just proves that there are people out there who want the government to be a big nanny for everybody.

Joe Eszterhas, author of “American Rhapsody”

Bob Dylan lives across from me. BFD. But within the context of tonight’s debate … and I truly hate to say this … to Al Gore: It’s all over now, baby blue … and to George W. Bush: All along the watchtower … and to America: The times they are a-changin’.

Christopher Buckley, editor of Forbes FYI magazine

Though no one in the studio audience asked it, maybe the operative question last night should have been, “Which one of you two guys would I like to be stuck on a long bus ride with?”

For me that would settle it very quickly. Jim Lehrer.

My second choice for the Chicago-to-L.A. Greyhound run would be George W. Bush, because I get the sense that before we got hit Iowa, he’d turn to me and say, “You know, I’m just makin’ this up as I go along. But I think I got pretty decent instincts, and I think I could be OK as president. ” If Gore were sitting next to me on that trip, I’d have switched my seat before we even pulled out of the station; or swallowed the whole bottle of Advil, which I’m told will do the existential trick.

All politicians “embellish” to use the current term for “lie.” Bush may be “fuzzy” — to use his term — on some points. Gore gives the impression of being oblivious to the distinction. He operates on the plane of meta-veracity. Watching him tonight, I wondered if he really even realized if he was telling intelligence-insulting untruths. He said, “I am a person who keeps promises.” Fine, but where does that leave, “There was no controlling legal authority.” (His justification for shaking down Buddhist monks for campaign donations.) In this light, his chest-thumping endorsement of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill was hollandaise sauce. My inner child cried, “Hel-lo?” He gives the impression of a man who has spun so many times that his needle no longer has the faintest idea where to find True — or even magnetic — north.

Bush at least gives the impression of a man keenly aware, perhaps even keenly aware, of his shortcomings. He has the gift of self-deprecation and humor, which can help get a president — to say nothing of the country — through uncertain times. (Compare Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.)

In his closing statement Bush said, “To those who support my opponent, please only vote once.” That’s a warm-blooded guy. In his closing statement, Al Gore reminded us, really one too many times, that he had gone to Vietnam. To this he added that he had been faithful to his wife. Leaving aside what those two statements say about the president he has spent the last eight years serving under, whom he so memorably described as “One of our greatest presidents” — there are those who may be a teensy bit uncomfortable at such self-promoting manifestations of virtue. That he followed these declarations by shameless — and unattributed — plagiarism of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 signature campaign line, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” declares his imaginative Chapter 11 bankruptcy. What undecided voters remain may take this the final evidence that, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, “There’s no there there.”

That civility may not be to Gore’s benefit. Any corrective action he took to overcome his pit bull image after the last debate or any points he scored during Wednesday night’s discussion of Texas healthcare were counterbalanced by Bush’s ability to hold his own in a 45-minute discussion on foreign policy. By agreeing with most of the vice president’s positions, Bush may have helped put to rest the Gore campaign’s sharpest critique — that Bush simply isn’t presidential timber. Even Gore loyalists conceded that Bush’s performance was a step up from last week.

Al Franken, author and comedian

Well, I wished there hadn’t been quite so much foreign policy because basically they agree on that. So it would have been nice to spend a little bit more time on the things that I think the people are going to make their decisions on. I would have liked to have seen a little bit more fleshing out of these fuzzy numbers arguments and specifically about the tax cut and what that means in terms of spending for Medicare and the environment.

To some degree they reflect an ideological divide that exists in this country, and I was just sitting there going, “Well, I suppose that if you believe that we should wait longer on global warming, until we have more science saying that it’s being caused by carbon monoxide emissions, then you would go for Bush.”

In the first debate, the story became the vice president’s manner and whether he was overbearing or off-putting. But the fact of the matter is, he did show much more command of the issues. I did think that the governor had a weak performance in the first debate. I thought he was better tonight.

I think that the “Gore is unlikable” [stereotype] was kind of contradicted. But I like him, so you’re asking the wrong guy. And I thought Bush showed enough command of foreign policy to look like he could rely enough on Colin Powell and Cheney and Condoleezza Rice to get through it.

As presidential material, [Bush is] not the most intellectually curious person we’ve had run for the office. The argument is made that Ronald Reagan wasn’t all that intellectually curious himself and was a great president. I think he wasn’t a great president, but he did believe in two things, I guess. He was anti-communist, and for lowering taxes and creating a huge deficit. I guess that’s three things.

Lucianne Goldberg, radio talk show host and publisher of Lucianne.com News Forum.

Charm beats smarm every time. Dubya is known among his vast acquaintances as a man of great humor and the snappy wisecrack, traits that are hard to showcase in a stultifyingly boring format like a national debate. This was particularly true last night, when his opponent, who last week showed up looking and sounding like Mrs. Doubtfire, had morphed into a condescending celebrity hairdresser who silently reproaches you for what you’ve done to your hair. Gore tried hard to keep his facts straight and his eyes in one place, but the damage had been done and the memory of lies and too much makeup lingered.

To choose a winner or loser in so artificial an event is ludicrous. What most people do is choose the man they want in their living rooms for four years, and in that case it was Dubya hands down.

Dubya gets extra points for not mentioning his mother, his wife, his dog, his car or anyone he knows who can’t pay for their pills.

Andrew Sullivan, senior editor at the New Republic

If last week’s debate was an assisted suicide, then this week’s was a burial. I counted around 15 minutes when Gore clearly had the advantage — the exchange over healthcare in Texas — but the rest of the time, Bush creamed him. Last week, Bush demolished Gore on style; this week, he largely dismantled him on both style and substance. On foreign policy, Gore seemed vague and confused, interspersed with occasional moments of worrying idealism. Bush seemed focused, knowledgeable — East Timor? Chernomyrdin? Kyoto? — and sensible. Condoleezza Rice should get some sort of teaching award.

I can’t think of a single domestic issue — apart from healthcare — where Gore had an edge. Having moved far to the left in August and September, Gore now tried to zig back to the center. It’s too late to zig. The resulting incoherence only lends credibility to those who believe Gore will say anything. What I’ve learned this year about a man I once greatly admired is that, sadly, he doesn’t seem to know who he is or what he really believes. He seems to be grasping at straws. Watching him tonight, he seemed tired, depressed, defeated. I think he thinks he’s lost. It showed.

Bush, on the other hand, exuded confidence. He leaned back and smiled; Gore leaned forward and furrowed his brow. Take the debate over gay marriage, which I understandably listened to closely. I loathed Bush’s answer — don’t homosexuals deserve the sacred as well? — but I found it more coherent than [that of] Gore, who was trying to triangulate on an issue which allows no triangulation. (And can someone please tell Gore it’s “civil union,” not “civic union”?)

On hate crimes, the same diffidence showed. When Bush said he had a hate crimes law in Texas, Gore should have pointed out that it doesn’t include gays, and that’s what they disagree on. But Gore didn’t, because he’s too scared to make an issue about gay rights in a neutral setting. So he punted. And Bush won that round by seeming tougher on hate crimes than Gore! Neither side made the coherent point, of course, that such laws are pernicious examples of exactly the kind of special rights Bush allegedly decries. But Bush’s chutzpah defeated Gore’s defensiveness.

Gore has one advantage in debates — he knows how to go for the jugular. But after last week, he was obviously told to be nice. So he was defanged. But without fangs, what else has he got? On charm, likability, credibility, he loses. On intellect, he wins. But tonight, Bush cleaned up. He seemed — and, no, I’m not stoned — more intelligent and eloquent than Gore. So Gore was left flailing. I suspect that last week was the turning point in this campaign and that tonight sealed it. I saw only one man on that stage who seemed to have the self-confidence, self-esteem and focus to be president. And it wasn’t Gore.

Joe Eszterhas, author of “American Rhapsody”

Al Gore will lose this election unless:

1. He forgets everything Naomi Wolf has ever told him;

2. He ignores everything Bill Daley is telling him;

3. He hires James Carville immediately;

4. He goes deep into the woods for a week, finds himself and shows us — finally — the real, uncoached and human Al Gore.

Norman Lear, television producer

I was disgusted. I have three grown children who couldn’t bear watching more than a half an hour of the debate. I also have three small children and I think who this next president is, if there was no other reason than the Supreme Court, could not be more important to their lives. There was no sense of the importance of any of this to the country my kids are going to grow up in.

I don’t think it’s because there’s no difference between the two. Not at all. I think it’s because there’s no such thing as honest feelings and honest opinion absent spin in politics today. There is plenty of difference between the two. Just take the Supreme Court. Who appoints the next round of justices may be the most important issue in this race, and it didn’t even come up. And not even one of them feels with enough conviction to bring it forward.

The advice the candidates are getting comes from polls on both sides. It comes from polls and what the momentary attitudes of people might be. Neither of them is speaking his mind, speaking his heart. They talk about heart, they talk about compassion, but they don’t speak from the same heart they describe.

I’ve never seen such a passionless campaign. But I think we’ve been moving toward this for a long time. I do think the biggest issue in terms of all the social issues we all care about is related to who makes the next group of Supreme Court apppointments. That will affect the next 40-45 years of the social culture of our country. We’re talking about a lot more than abortion. We’re just in the beginning of the age of all the discussions regarding biotechnology, rights of privacy and intellectual property. Who owns the human genome? These are all things the next court will decide over the next few years. And I don’t want these issues decided by people who think market forces ought to control everything.

I think Gore had Bush on healthcare in Texas, but I don’t think he drove it home. Where gun control is concerned, I thought both of them pussyfooted in every direction trying to please everybody. Gore didn’t force any of the issues, nor did Bush for that matter. If I were on the other side, I’d have the same complaints. They spent all their time agreeing with each other. A pox on both their houses.

Ward Connerly, author of “Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences” and chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute

George W. Bush looked and sounded presidential in tonight’s debate, exceeding expectations both on foreign and domestic issues. His opponent helped shore up his foreign policy credentials by often agreeing with him. He also showed a sense of humor and self-deprecation that appeals to the average person. Al Gore, on the other hand, didn’t seem as relaxed or confident, though he managed to keep Bush on the defensive about the Texas record. Bush has to defend his state more effectively and take solace in the fact that the current president and vice president also came from Southern states that frequently come under attack for being below the national average in various ways.

On the issue of race, Bush showed a more optimistic view of America and the American people, noting that we are on the whole “good, tolerant people.” Gore took a more pessimistic view of our ability to treat each other fairly here at the dawn of the 21st century, though he was more explicit in expressing this belief when he and the president hosted a 1997 meeting of people opposed to affirmative action preferences. In that meeting, whose transcript is part of the public record, he told me and the others that “evil lies coiled in the human soul.” No matter how hard he tries, Gore is not likable and continues to divide the American people and mislead them with appeals to self-interest by class, income and race.

Joe Conason, author and Salon columnist

Until the last few minutes of this latest nondebate, Gore was overcorrecting his natural aggression to the point that he gave his opponent a free ride. He seemed reluctant to engage Bush on the issues that separate them during the first hour, as if he worried more about his press reviews than about delineating the differences that might move voters to his side. The rules of the seated conversational format favored Bush, who took full advantage of those rules to avoid the questions Gore put to him.

When he considers the outcome, Gore will regret waiting so long to start drawing contrasts the way he should have done all along — by contrasting Bush’s compassionate rhetoric with the Texas governor’s record. As soon as the vice president focused on the specifics of the governor’s mismanagement of environmental and health problems in Texas, Bush stumbled.

Gore made another error as well that reflected undue concern for the sensibilities of the national press. He failed to capitalize rhetorically on the successes of the Clinton-Gore administration, as if he preferred not to remind anyone about the existence of the president. Indeed, during their discussion of foreign policy, Bush at times sounded more eager to voice his support of Clinton policy than Gore himself.

Somehow Gore seems already to have forgotten the lesson of his successful convention speech: A progressive populist agenda, enunciated with vigor, is the way to consolidate support, win over swing voters and command public respect.

Christopher Buckley, editor of Forbes FYI magazine

Gov. Bush had to stay up past his normal 9:30 bedtime last night, but I think he’ll sleep very well. I was quite struck by what I saw.

If a president does something out of character in office that the press approves of, they magnanimously call it “growth in office.” It’s rare that you genuinely get to see growth in a campaign, but that’s what it looked like to me [Wednesday] night. I was genuinely blown away by Bush’s confidence, and his mastery of material. The man who a few weeks ago couldn’t get through a three-syllable word without turning it into a Möbius strip managed not only to pronounce the name of Viktor Chernomyrdin, former prime minister of Russia, but to call the man what he was, a thief. He gave the impression of a man it would be fun to spend time with. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to spend four years with smarmy lectures by Gore. Whatever else, he needs to work on his stare. It’s downright weird.

If I were the Gore campaign, I would not sleep well tonight, and tomorrow I would wake up feeling afraid. Very afraid.

Stanley Crouch, critic and author of “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome”

This second one was much better than the first, primarily because both men were not only more civil, they seemed much more natural. Gore has long had the problem of seeming to be a male version of the mythical Daphne, the nymph of Greek imagination who turned into a laurel tree while running. In a one-on-one situation, away from the flashbulbs and the podium, Gore is a witty, charming and quite intelligent man.

This was the first time I saw Gore actually come off as himself in a public situation. He seemed relaxed, his sense of humor wasn’t forced, there appeared to be an informing intelligence behind every word, he gave no impression of being afraid of military use when necessary and there wasn’t the unnecessary condescension, which should never expose itself because it reads to an audience as either unattractive or unearned arrogance. He fully avoided the trap that one guy who hates Bush said about the first debate, “Why does Gore look as though he likes coming off as a combination of a school marm and a big drip of egotistical snot?”

I also thought that Bush came off as himself, as natural and far more informed about the nature of the world at large than he has thus far been given credit for, even if he did no more than cram for this debate (which is what politicians do all of the time, the best of them absorbing information at a high velocity and incorporating it into the DNA basic to the arguments that drive their policy positions and the legislation they propose or oppose). Bush was so swift on some of the foreign policy issues that he seemed to have beaten Gore to some of his positions on the military, use of military force, foreign aid and the problems of how to handle aid when faced with corrupt foreign governments. He, too, had a sense of humor, a down-home wit that served him well.

Bush also seemed to have a good grasp of something very profound about “racial profiling” — which is that the very worst version of it is the failure to educate due to a lack of commitment based on color. His answer to Gore, about advocating a new hate crimes law, was very strong — he responded by saying that the murder of James Byrd was a hate crime because hate is always behind murder.

Gore did not draw blood when he tried to stick on the issues of race and tax cuts, but he did get more than a trickle when stating that Texas was positioned as both the 49th and 50th state on some healthcare issues. But Gore put himself in potential trouble at the end when the issue of exaggeration came up. He talked as though he had only made some mistakes, not willfully told untruths. The vice president might well have done himself some good by facing up to what has been a tendency to play plastic man with the truth and promise not to do it again. Sometimes, confession is good for the polls and for the polling booths — especially when connected to a believable vow.

Todd Gitlin, professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University

Bush speaks and smiles as if he’s the man who presides over the current prosperity. This is the voice of smooth complacency. The world is going the right way, starting with the state of Texas, never mind what you’ve heard from unreliable sources.

He’s the man for cheerful maintenance. He’s the president of progress, the good ole boy at the country club. He’s right there with “What the heck” and “I’ve been known to mangle a ‘syl-la-bul’ or two.” Sounds like a fun four years.

Gore sounds tense and urgent. He’s not the voice of achievement; he’s the voice of will. He has the narrowed eyes and controlled speech of a crusader. He speaks in the imperative voice. He’s all earnestness. He wants us to think about the fate of the Earth and about other things that a lot of people would just as soon not think about. He’s indignant about injustice, focused on “getting the big things right.” Bush is just indignant about Gore. Fearful of sounding strident, Gore is reluctant to pin the Republican label on Bush, while Bush triangulates.

And Jim Lehrer? Tolerant, mannerly, accepting of distortion, unprobing when Bush denies again and again that he has anything in common with the Republican Congress that has shared in government for the last eight years.

Ben Stein, host of the Comedy Central program “Win Ben Stein’s Money”

The first mistake that Gore made — and this totally slipped by everybody — is saying we no longer have a problem with trade imbalances, which is not true. They are astonishingly big. The only thing is that nobody worries about them anymore because of the economic expansion.

That wasn’t the only mistake he made. Gore repeated that the Bush tax plan benefits go to the wealthiest 1 percent, or as he said Wednesday night, the richest of the rich, which is simply not true. Bush’s proposal to end the estate tax would benefit the wealthy. As for the income tax, after the implementation of the Bush plan, the wealthy would actually be paying a greater portion of the income tax than in the Gore plan. What the vice president keeps doing is conflating Bush’s proposals on the estate tax and the income tax.

I was shocked at Gore’s saying that we need something like a Marshall Plan for Africa like we had in Europe after World War II. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of history knows that the situations are totally different. Europe had been devastated by war and was put in a temporary poverty, but the population had great economic skills. In Africa, you’re talking about countries that are more or less permanently impoverished by their inhabitants’ lack of economic and intellectual capital. What Gore said shows extreme ignorance of history.

I thought the question about hate crime was a very odd question. Gore said that there was no hate crime law in Texas, and Bush said there already is one. Bush made a mistake by not simply saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We already have a hate crime law.” He did hit the thing right out of the park on the James Byrd case, when he said, “Look, we are already executing the criminals. What could be harsher than that?”

As for the uninsured children, the reason so few children in Texas are insured is because the state has a huge percentage of illegal aliens and children of illegal aliens in the population. Those people don’t have many things that middle-class people have. If you were to take out the illegal immigrants, Texas’ insurance rate would be normal.

The dynamic of the evening was very interesting. At the beginning, when the topic was foreign policy, Bush was very confident, but when they got back to talking about Texas, he wasn’t. I think it’s unfortunate that he’s not a very aggressive debater.

David Horowitz, Salon columnist

This was a big knockdown for Bush. He revealed a personality that was animated, warm, bighearted and civilly forceful. He showed he was no pushover. He showed — contrary to what his detractors say — that he had a brain and a command of details. These are the two key character tests for him in this campaign. He was also tolerant, inclusive, “reasonable” and centrist — but innovative — in his policy positions: “a conservative with compassion.” He allowed Gore no real daylight on the caring issues, and thereby made the character issue the primary focus of this debate. Facing a man who was publicly straining to correct himself for fibbing, winning the character issue was a piece of cake for Bush.

Gore’s strategy of self-control, on the other hand, worked relentlessly against him in this informal setting. He seemed icy and cold, back to the automaton image, programmed to the core. Moreover, Gore’s new self-control strategy allowed Bush to shine — which Gore could not afford to let him do. For example, when Gore approached Bush’s jugular on Texas, he could not go in for the kill, which is fatal for the attacker in this situation. You cannot blast Texas as the bottom of the barrel and then allow the target to come back. When Bush said (essentially), There you go exaggerating again, you don’t know what you’re talking about, we have spent billions on this, we have improved as fast as any state, while you’ve let the same problem get worse on your watch, Gore had to come back and crush him. But he didn’t. That undermined his credibility even further.

The debate left me more confident than ever that Bush not only will endure in this contest but will prevail.

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 href="http://www.lucianne.com">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.”

But the problem with McCain is that he’s in a war of attrition. Even though he’s had a good run and surprised a lot of people, my sense is that after Super Tuesday, it’s going to be pretty clearly Bush’s nomination. McCain is a very competitive guy, and I personally think he would be a stronger candidate in the final election. But look, Bush has the whole party operation behind him. It’s like George Bush’s battle for the nomination in 1988, when two out of three primary voters were not happy with Bush as the candidate and were looking for an alternative. Dole, Kemp and Robertson were suddenly in there. But Bush was able to bring the party base around to him — he was helped of course by a lot of residual Reagan supporters — and he won the nomination and the election.

I think a lot of Republicans were really resentful that Bush was sort of coronated as the inevitable nominee. The parties don’t mean much to anybody anymore. It’s all a personality contest, and McCain is, by far, winning the personality contest so far. Having been a part of Reagan’s campaigns in 1976 and 1980, and a bit with the Perot campaign in 1992, I can sense that McCain has tapped into some of that same appeal that a strong character draws.

The problem I think for Bush is that really, before the primaries, people didn’t know that much about him. Suddenly, to some people, he seems like a candidate of the religious right. It’s very hard to overcome these first impressions, as Dan Quayle later found out. The irony is that if you were to put Dan Quayle today up against George W. Bush, he would do just fine. But he was just never able to rehabilitate his image after the Republican convention in 1988. These first impressions are crucial. Sometimes you can alter them, and for Bush, it’s still early. But he hasn’t done as well as expected, hasn’t turned out to be the giant-killer people once thought he was.

Arianna Huffington, political columnist

Basically, I think that last night we saw clearly that it will take a movement to reform our current political system and that it’s not going to be brought about through the two party process. As it happened with the civil rights movement, it took a movement to rise up and demand changes to a broken system, and political leaders only ratified it through legislation. McCain’s victories show the longing for reform among voters, but his defeat makes it clear that it’s just not going to happen through the parties.

Now, if you look at California, you have this great opportunity for McCain to cry foul. It’s a classic case of the two parties hijacking the process. The people of California voted not once, you understand, but twice for an open primary, and the courts upheld the system. And then the legislators changed it. That should not be allowed.

If McCain can win the “beauty contest” in California and lose the Republican primary, it will be very interesting. We’ll see if McCain is a real populist, if he will act on what the voters are saying. Then the question will be whether he’s going to do that, or if he’s going to end up going to the convention, endorsing George Bush, and playing the typical political game.

David Horowitz, Salon columnist

The dynamics of the political debate inside the Republican primary have begun to change in a manner favorable to Bush. McCain’s attack on Robertson and Falwell in Virginia was a tactical over-reach.

Disciplining the religious right and showing one’s independence from them is a necessity for any viable Republican candidate. The political center in American politics is allergic to the Falwells and the Robertsons with their embarrassing intolerances and weird cosmologies, and in my view rightly so. For Bush it will be advisable at some future date. Cutting Robertson’s phone bank off is a first step.

But McCain over-reached. Instead of merely distancing himself from Falwell and Robertson, he compared them to the race-haters and race-baiters Farrakhan and Sharpton, which they are not. He compounded this mistake by calling Bush a “Pat Robertson Republican,” thus insulting the Republican mainstream, which is as embarrassed and concerned by Robertson as is the political center, but stops short of demonizing them. The effect of this is to lock down Republicans for Bush.

Thus ends the first phase of the primary campaign. Until now, Bush has had to prove himself to the conservative base of the party, which has distrusted the Bush camp for two decades. As a Bush supporter myself, the biggest heat I got from friends in the months between Bush’s announced candidacy and the primaries was “Is this guy really a conservative? Or is he like his father?”

Well, Bush in fact is a break-the-mold conservative who is inclusive and “compassionate,” which means he’s ready to undertake some government activism in behalf of the truly disadvantaged. This puts him in a position to pick up independents and conservative Democrats, which is what he did in Texas, garnering 69 percent of the vote. By running to the center in the primaries, McCain forced Bush to the right and into the arms of Robertson merely to survive. But the ferocity of McCain’s attack has ended this phase of the contest, and now provides an incentive to Bush to move forcefully to the center.

By driving the right to Bush, McCain has actually freed Bush to focus on showing his more compassionate colors. Conversely McCain has cast himself in a more negative, divisive light, which is at odds with the centrist-heroic persona that has gotten him here. The result is that Bush is steadily picking up more independents with each successive primary. Since Bush’s inclusiveness comes naturally to him, he is well-positioned to increase his lead in the next phase of the campaign.

Joe Conason, Salon columnist

Bush will live to regret his “rescue” by the religious right. Fighting off McCain, the Texan has been pushed further and further into the same extremist corner he has been trying to escape since this campaign began. Does the result in Virginia mean that Pat Robertson gets a prime-time speech at the GOP convention?

Lately, McCain seems to be trying to cripple the Republican establishment by breaking away moderates and independents. Maybe he wants to take them down with him. If so, his tactics are working, though not as well for him as for Al Gore. Exit polls in Virginia Tuesday showed that 40 percent of McCain voters plan to vote for Al Gore in the fall.

As for Bradley, the Washington state results were a devastating rebuff to both his preening self-righteousness and his inscrutable strategy. Among Democratic voters at least, there now seems to be greater fatigue with him than with Clinton or Gore. His own record in the Senate and afterward provided no rationale for this campaign. His protest candidacy has lacked the energy to inspire a real insurgency. That is why dissident Democrats are now more interested in McCain than they are in him.

Sean Wilentz, Princeton professor and New Republic contributing editor

McCain has never really had a chance, despite all the hubbub. He may — and I stress may — be a presentiment of the GOP’s future, but not for 2000. Basically, the Republicans are in the same situation as the Democrats were circa 1972, and it will take them at least a couple of election cycles to reinvent themselves. Yesterday’s primaries confirm this: Republicans love George W. So George W. will be the nominee, and in all likelihood will lose. If he’s not the McGovern, then he’s the Mondale of today’s GOP.

As for Bradley-Gore, Bradley has long been finished, and yesterday simply confirmed it. Democrats (and the majority of the country as a whole) love Clinton-Gore. Ergo, Gore will be the nominee. And, at present, you’ve got to see Gore as the likely winner in November.