As predicted, the super-compressed, super-front-loaded presidential nominating system did its job. In a six-week window, starting Jan. 24 in Iowa and ending Tuesday night in California, the two leading candidates for president have been all but officially nominated, winning so many delegates that they are unstoppable.
Democrat Al Gore and Republican George Bush now have some eight months to campaign and let voters determine which of them emerges as the next president of the United States.It will be tough and almost certainly nasty. Voters who have turned out in record numbers during the brief primary season, largely to cast their votes for John McCain, could sit on their hands come November. Special interest money will flood both campaigns.
Six weeks is too brief a period to have the field so winnowed. A short election season may work in Britain or other parliamentary governments, where the candidates for prime minister are put forward by their respective parties, who know their qualities for leadership. But in America, where a McCain or a Bush can emerge from seemingly nowhere, not to mention a thoroughly unvetted Steve Forbes or Ross Perot, there's an awful lot we don't know about the person we might choose for the most powerful office in the world.
So what have we learned about Gore and Bush from this truncated campaign? First, we learned that Bill Bradley and McCain made each of them better candidates. They were forced to dig deeply within themselves when the going got tough to find the inspiration to show people how much they really want the job. Voters have to know that the person they select for president takes neither the office nor the people for granted. And for a while there, it looked as though both Gore and Bush were doing precisely that. Both had to shed their play-it-safe, front-runner strategies and directly confront their opponents.
Having said that, though, Gore appears to have emerged from this primary process stronger than Bush. For one thing, he has completely secured his party's base. His triumph over Bradley on Tuesday was total. Exit polls showed him winning virtually every demographic group among Democrats, except the small minority of Democrats who don't like President Clinton.
Second, with the exception of a few areas where Bradley forced Gore farther to the left than he probably wanted to go -- gays in the military and national registration of handguns, for example -- Gore remains a centrist candidate in the tradition of Clinton's policies. Every time Bradley attacked Gore as a "conservative Democrat," Gore almost certainly made sure he got the attacks on video for later use.
Finally, national Democrats were worried sick about McCain's appeal to independents and conservative Democrats. In Bush, they think they have the weaker opponent. Bush's own campaign spending excesses -- including a Bush billionaire supporter from Texas who financed a $2.5 million media smear against McCain last week -- will make it tougher for Bush to hit Gore on his 1996 campaign spending excesses, including the now-notorious Buddhist temple fund raiser in Southern California.
For his part, Bush showed a real winning hand Tuesday, taking the big three states of California, New York and Ohio, in addition to several others. But where Bradley won not a single primary or caucus, McCain's earlier successes in New Hampshire and Michigan prompted Bush to take a nasty turn to the right, embracing the Rev. Pat Robertson and making his now-infamous visit to anti-Catholic Bob Jones University. McCain's attacks on Robertson and the Christian right did him no good -- indeed, firmed up Bush's base among religious conservatives. But Bush also has some serious repair work to do among Catholic, moderate and independent voters, Tuesday's exit polls revealed.
But Bush has an even more serious problem: Does he have the gravitas to be president? This was a question that hounded him in early debates, when his performance was weak and Bush supporters began to get queasy about whether their candidate had the right stuff.
Exit polls throughout the country Tuesday show voters still have major reservations about the Texas governor and son of the former president. Exit polls asked whether voters voting in Republican primaries believe Bush "knows enough" to be president.
The response ranged from a low of 15 percent who said no in California to a high of 45 percent who said no in Massachusetts, which McCain won. Even in states Bush won, sizable numbers of Republican voters question his fitness to be president. In New York, 30 percent said Bush doesn't know enough; in Maine, it was 28 percent; in Ohio 24 percent; in Missouri 25 percent. These are sobering figures for any candidate.
One other problem with the abbreviated process: Voters really have gotten up for the fight. Even though many may participate in next Tuesday's primaries, there is a palpable feel of anticlimax. There will be nothing to capture the attention of the voting public until the conventions in late summer, and they are likely to be set pieces, devoid of suspense and covered half-heartedly by the networks. Let us hope Gore and Bush can rise to the challenge and inspire voters to stay interested and focus on what Bradley has called a "better" kind of politics. But history suggests no such luck.
Sacramento Bee Political editor John Jacobs can be reached at jjacobs@sacbee.com