Experts Expound

Who really won? What happens now?

We all won! Young people are fired up to vote. Turnout was the highest in decades, and California is once again a player in the presidential race.

Democrats! Record turnout. Luring DTS voters (thanks to the CRP) to keep voting for Dems. Strong Latino influence. And a powerful show of force from women who won’t vote for an anti-choice, anti-environment candidate like McCain.

Money won. Greed won. Hubris, on the other hand, lost.

Now? At the state level, leadership fights inform efforts to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis. It’s like injecting the saliva of a rabid dog into an already overstimulated colony of wasps.

At the national level, McCain begins to vet vice presidential nominees. Clinton and Obama treat the nation to another few rounds of full-contact cage combat, while Democratic poobahs quietly begin to ponder strategies for a deadlocked convention.

Hillary wins the Dem nomination, faces McCain in November. McCain becomes our next president because Hillary is so disliked and divisive she galvanizes the Republican vote and it turns out that even Dems have a hard time voting for her. Too bad. I think she’d make a good president.

I think it shows that Hillary is viable and it will go for a long time. I think McCain is the nominee.

Senator Clinton with a bullet.  Once again, the mainstream media overreacted to the results in an isolated small state and a series of consistently inconsistent polls and hero-worshipped Senator Obama’s candidacy for 10 consecutive days and media cycles. In spite of all that, she won every state she was supposed to win and still leads in the total delegate count.

Nationally, Obama really won in that he’s virtually dead even with Hillary coming out of Super Tuesday and retains his momentum. In California, the four tribes won big, and that’s about it. Now we head for the June primaries, which will have about 11 percent voter turnout.

John McCain was the clear winner. Those who supported him early, like Sen. Jeff Denham, Assemblyman Van Tran and Assemblyman George Plescia, will end up being the go-to guys for the campaign.

Obama also won. He gave the assumed nominee everything she could handle.

The tribes won. Hillary and McCain won. But nobody won as much as Núñez and Perata lost.

Obama won, because his campaign managed to squeak out a virtual tie in delegates and popular votes on a night in which big Dem primaries (New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts) that favor Clinton were held. His fundraising advantage, along with upcoming primaries that seemingly favor him, puts him in a great position to win the nomination.

Dems won big with a huge voter turnout compared to the Republicans. That was to be expected. It was Camelot II and the First Woman vs. Grumpy Old Man; the Ultimate Flip-Flopper and the talented and personally likeable Fundamentalist Wack Job. The GOP race looks like Grumpy wins it; the Dem race looks like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Oh, to be a superdelegate!

On the Democratic side, no one really won, and the battle goes on, but both candidates came out basically unscathed. On the Republican side, the Republican Party was the big loser, because even though John McCain carried most of the big states, those states will never be in play for the Republican nominee in November (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California). But he lost in many of the states that a Republican must carry, mostly due to concern about his politics and ideology among the Republican base. The fact that Huckabee carried five states with no money really is a reflection on McCain and his ability to win in November

The people from whom we sought opinions:Andrew Acosta, A.G. Block, Mark Bogetich, Barry Brokaw, Morgan Crinklaw, J. Dale Debber, Peter DeMarco, Jim Evans, Kathy Fairbanks, Jeff Fuller, Rex Frazier, Ken Gibson, Evan Goldberg, Deborah Gonzalez, Sandy Harrison, Bob Hertzberg, Jason Kinney, Mike Madrid, Nicole Mahrt, Steve Maviglio, Adam Mendelsohn, Barbara O’Connor, Bill Packer, Kassy Perry, Jack Pitney, Adam Probolsky, Tony Quinn, Matt Rexroad, Matt Ross, Roger Salazar, Dan Schnur, Will Shuck, Ralph Simoni, Sam Sorich, Ray Sotero, Gary South, Kevin Spillane, Rich Zeiger