Bush, Gore Win Coast to Coast

Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore rolled to coast-to-coast primary victories Tuesday, setting up an expected matchup between the two this November.

Bush triumphed easily over John McCain in California’s delegate contest and won primaries in more than a half-dozen other states, including Ohio and New York.

On the Democratic side, Gore turned a once-competitive race with Bill Bradley into a rout. His support topped 80% in Georgia, 70% in Ohio, and 60% in New York, Maryland and Missouri. The vice president ran strongly in California returns as well, winning big among Democrats--whose votes count for convention delegates--and leading in the “beauty contest” that lumped all candidates together.

Bradley was poised to leave the race Thursday, and McCain also was reassessing his campaign.

While McCain held out hope for a symbolic popular vote victory in California, projections showed him coming in third. Bradley and Republican Alan Keyes were the fourth- and fifth-place finishers.

Gore and Bush quickly turned their sights to November--and each other--using their victory speeches to preview their fall campaigns and reach out to the independent voters who are crucial in deciding presidential campaigns. Both sounded reform themes and urged crossover voters to embrace their campaigns.

“My friends, they don’t call it Super Tuesday for nothing,” an exultant Gore said to about 500 supporters at a hotel in Nashville. “My heart is full tonight.”

In remarks clearly aimed at Bush and his fellow Republicans, Gore said he hoped to “build on our record of prosperity. We don’t need to go back to where we were eight years ago.”

America “tried their approach before,” he said. “It produced a . . . recession and quadrupled the national debt. If you don’t want to go back to that, then join us now. Our campaign is your cause.”

Looking ahead to the general election, Gore challenged his GOP opponent--presumably Bush--to twice-weekly debates. And picking up where McCain left off, Gore stressed his call for a ban on so-called soft money, the largely unregulated contributions at the heart of the 1996 campaign-finance scandal.

Gore said he would challenge the GOP nominee to hold open meetings with him, allowing voters to question the two candidates simultaneously. Such joint appearances, he said, would “make this a contest of ideas and not insults, a campaign conducted in full daylight and not through secretly funded special-interest attack ads or smear telephone calls.”

Bush, widely heralded as the party’s savior before his campaign was stunned by a succession of early McCain victories, accepted Tuesday’s wins in an Austin, Texas, hotel ballroom packed with cheering supporters.

“We were challenged, and we met the challenge,” the Texas governor said. “We were tested, and we were equal to the test. We promised a national campaign, and tonight we have a national victory.”

He reached out to McCain and Keyes, whose convictions he lauded. And he raised a fist to Gore, against whom he appears likely to run in the fall.

“He is the candidate of the status quo in Washington, D.C., . . . and he has a tough case to make in the general election,” he declared. “I will repair the broken bonds of trust between Americans and their government.”

Vows to Return Honor to White House

Bush also came close to casting his campaign as a continuation of the reign of his father, former President Bush, who served one term before his 1992 loss to Bill Clinton and his running mate, Gore. He said: “We are ready--and I believe this great country of ours is ready--to return exiled honor to the White House.”

For his part, McCain issued vague indications that his campaign might not last out the week. He plans to meet with senior aides at his Cottonwood, Ariz., retreat today.

“We won a few and we lost a few today,” the senator from Arizona told supporters at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. “And over the next few days, we will take some time to enjoy our victories and take stock of our losses.”

Across the country, in New York City, Bradley met defeat with brevity after phoning Gore with congratulations for the first time in the campaign. “He won; I lost,” the subdued candidate told hundreds of supporters in a hotel ballroom done up in red, white and blue.

“Change isn’t easy,” he went on, signaling that his bid to upset Gore had come to an end. “It doesn’t always come quickly . . . . I hope history will write that we tried to change politics, to restore trust and to defeat the politics of expediency.”

Long before the polls closed, the Bradley camp took steps to end his candidacy, which never recovered from his loss five weeks ago in the New Hampshire primary. His withdrawal is expected Thursday.

Based on preliminary results, Gore is about halfway to the 2,170 delegates needed to win the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

On the Republican side, Bush won at least eight of the 13 states up for grabs Tuesday and the vast majority of the 602 delegates at stake. Included were all 162 of California’s Republican delegates, which are dispensed on a winner-take-all basis. McCain won four states, and votes were still trickling in in the final state, Hawaii.

Bush’s victories Tuesday put him within range of all but wrapping up the GOP nomination next week, when 341 more delegates will be selected. The nominee needs to rack up 1,034 delegates to close out the contest.

The balloting marked the biggest day of the campaign season, with more than half of each party’s nominating delegates up for grabs in a jumble of contests from Maine to Georgia to Washington state.

Along with awarding convention delegates, California voters also cast their first “blanket” ballots in a presidential primary, choosing among all the candidates in a nonbinding popularity vote. Democrats were quick to tout Gore’s top finish as a good sign for November.

“California is the big enchilada,” said Gov. Gray Davis, as he watched the early returns at a Biltmore Hotel suite in downtown Los Angeles. “This is a very positive omen.”

Good Times Stopped in N.H.

For Republicans, the Tuesday results put the most unequivocal cast yet on a campaign year notable for its chaotic uncertainties and roller-coaster results.

Bush had spent the first months of the race regally sweeping across the country as nominee-in-waiting, but the good times stopped rolling on Feb. 1 in New Hampshire, when McCain trounced him by 18 percentage points. The race shifted to South Carolina, and with it the momentum. Bush rallied to sweep McCain, but the senator bounced back with victories in Michigan and Arizona, his home state, on Feb. 22. Bush then righted himself with victories last week in Virginia, Washington and North Dakota.

Tuesday’s vote followed arguably the roughest patch for McCain and the smoothest for Bush. McCain, in remarks considered outlandish by Republican Party standards, took on the leadership of the party’s religious conservatives in a speech delivered in the Christian Coalition’s birthplace, Virginia Beach, Va.

But his lumping together of conservatives Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell with the Rev. Al Sharpton backfired, angering those who admired the conservative leaders and casting McCain’s temperament in doubt.

“Looking back on it, the day he’ll rue in the campaign is when he went down and took on, in an inappropriate fashion, the Reverends Robertson and Falwell,” said New York strategist Kieran Mahoney, a Republican. “If he had made those statements in sorrow and not in anger, it would have served him well. By being vitriolic, he raised more questions about himself than he did about them.”

As McCain was faltering, Bush was growing ever more sure-footed. In the last week, he returned to his earlier, more inclusive approach; in the days that followed he hammered McCain on issues like education that shored up his support among women and moderates.

In California and other states, however, it was less the recent tactical moves than Bush’s early prowess that dictated the results.

“Bush brought along a large number of party officials and elected officials, and that certainly helped him a great deal, whereas McCain had far less of an organization,” said Eric Rademacher, co-director of the University of Cincinnati’s Ohio Poll. “While they made a run in terms of organization, they had a big gap to make up.”

In California, Bush gathered the endorsements of 90% of the state’s elected officials, though the state’s senior Republican, Secretary of State Bill Jones, rescinded his endorsement in mid-February and defected to McCain. In late fall, Bush further endeared himself to the state GOP political establishment by headlining a fund-raiser that wiped out the party’s debt.

By last weekend, the trend for Bush was so pronounced in the major Tuesday states that he turned his attention to the general election. He spoke regularly about the ease with which he and McCain would bind the wounds of the primary.

On election day, he was alternately cautious and cocky, declaring himself ready for the November contest--and then belligerently jumping on Gore for the vice president’s criticism of Bush’s campaign funding.

“One of the things I’ll do during the course of the campaign is to remind people what’s gone on in the administration for the last seven years,” Bush told reporters gathered in his Austin statehouse office, in words that presaged a rough autumn.

Bradley Became Lone Alternative

Gore’s sweep from sea to sea capped a dramatic comeback and effectively closed a circle, going back to the race’s preliminary stages more than a year ago when the vice president was seen as the all-but-inevitable nominee. Gore appeared so strong at that point that several serious rivals, chief among them House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), opted not to run.

Bradley became the lone alternative to Gore, and his candidacy was an outlet for those Democrats disaffected with President Clinton. That helped coalesce support for Bradley, fueling his fund-raising and lending credence to his upstart candidacy, particularly as polls showed the vice president falling behind Texas Gov. Bush in national polls.

The turning point came in September, after surveys found Gore losing to Bradley in the key early state of New Hampshire.

The vice president responded with a top-to-bottom shake-up of his sluggish campaign, thinning his staff, moving his headquarters to Nashville from Washington, D.C., and adopting a more engaged, less imperial style of campaigning. After ignoring him for months, Gore began relentlessly attacking Bradley, keying on the health care plan offered by the former senator from New Jersey and his decision to leave Congress after the 1994 Republican takeover.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the weight of the party’s institutional allies--labor, big city mayors, women’s groups--began slowly, inexorably pressing on Bradley. For all Gore’s travails--the overpriced consultants, his claim to have invented the Internet, his ostentatious wardrobe change--”he did a lot of things right,” said Democratic strategist Bill Carrick. Chief among them was solidifying his advantages as vice president.

“He nailed down labor’s endorsement, he won the big endorsements of elected officials, African American and Latino leaders,” said Carrick, who sat out the primary fight. “He developed a message that took advantage of his role in a popular administration that has presided over enormous prosperity, and he brought a futuristic, change-oriented element to it.”

Gore handily won the Iowa caucuses and followed up a week later with a victory in the New Hampshire primary--a one-two blow that effectively snuffed Bradley’s insurgency.

“When he lost New Hampshire, it broke the back of his candidacy. There were no vertebrae left,” said Charles Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “The Bradley campaign was designed for college students and people who wear Birkenstocks and drive Volvos and Saabs, and they dominate the Democratic Party in New Hampshire. If Bradley couldn’t win there, where could he win?”

A Time of Great Expectations

Still, the scale of Gore’s blowout was something few would have predicted even a few weeks ago. It represented failure on a scale Bradley has rarely, if ever, tasted; until this year, the three-term senator had never lost an election.

Indeed, his presidential candidacy started with great expectations; for decades--as far back as his basketball stardom at Princeton University--onlookers anticipated the day that student-scholar Bradley would run for president.

His grand ambitions matched the high hopes. Outlining an agenda of “bold ideas,” he called for expansive gun controls, an elimination of child poverty and a major overhaul of the campaign finance system. His campaign centerpiece was a massive plan to provide access to health care for all Americans.

His start was impressive. Bradley stunned observers by matching Gore’s fund-raising nearly dollar for dollar. His low-key and erudite manner impressed many voters, who praised his “authenticity” and lauded his refusal to engage in the usual sort of political roughhousing.

Over time, however, his failure to rebut Gore’s ceaseless attacks badly blemished Bradley’s reputation and left his platform riddled by potshots. When Bradley finally responded, “he seemed petulant,” in the words of analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, and ended up dulling his high-minded image without doing much to dent Gore’s popularity.

Ultimately, his grand proposals proved too ambitious for a time when polls show most voters were fairly content with the status quo.

Bradley also suffered from events beyond his control. Chief among them was Republican John McCain’s emergence from New Hampshire as the insurgent who captivated the independent voters and reform-minded Democrats that Bradley also pursued. “John McCain just sucked the oxygen out of Bill Bradley’s campaign,” said Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University.

However, Bradley always faced long odds. “Even if he did everything right, he still probably would have lost,” said Carrick. “The fact is it’s very hard to beat a sitting vice president of the United States.”

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang, Matea Gold, Tom Gorman, Maria L. La Ganga, T. Christian Miller and Eric Slater contributed to this story.