Gore was clearly more presidential. One had the feeling that Gore had more resources of knowledge and experience to back up what he was saying, and that Bush was pretty thinly stretched.

I think it wasn't wise for either of them to argue so much over numbers. I believe that the only useful thing would be to read the news analysis tomorrow about whether the numbers add up. People, when they hear a lot of numbers, just kind of zone out. I felt that Bush was probably not wise to talk about Gore's fuzzy arithmetic since Gore seemed to have a better command of the numbers. Gore sighed more than I wanted him to sigh.

I think Bush had a pretty embarrassing response when he was asked about Milosevic, calling on Russia to intervene when he clearly didn't know that Russia does not support our position. And there were times when you didn't know if Bush could go the whole two minutes. For instance, in the question of how he would handle a crisis situation -- I wasn't reassured that Bush flew off to floods and fires in Texas. Every governor flies off to floods and fires. But that's not what that question was about. Gore's response about the conflict in Kosovo I felt was more germane.

One area I wish they would have gotten into was the death penalty. I would have asked Bush whether, since his state has the highest rate of executions, does he feel the other states have a lot of catching up to do? I wish it would have been brought up, because I believe that in Texas people are being executed without adequate defense or judicial protection with alarming frequency.

People expected Bush to melt down and he didn't, but I think he came across as a lightweight compared to the vice president. Watching the two of them I just didn't feel that Bush had the resources to be president, and that was dramatized by the fact that Gore has 24 years of national experience and Bush has only been governor of a state where the governor doesn't have that much power.

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At the beginning Bush was quite nervous and Gore was quite confident, but by the end Gore was quite nervous and Bush was very confident.

Bush didn't handle explaining his tax plan as well as he might have, because it's really a sensible plan. He should have mentioned that six Nobel Prize-winning economists believe it's a good plan, including the most respected economist in the field, Milton Friedman. If in fact Milton Friedman approves of the plan, then there's a lot going for it.

As for what Gore said, I think it's an arithmetic impossibility that half of Bush's tax cut would go to millionaires. There are only a few thousand people who meet that threshold. And I think that Gore was trying to obfuscate and confuse people on the plan to allow taxpayers to invest some of their Social Security. Bush hit that one right out of the park when he said, "Look, taxpayers can get 4 percent if they put that money in government bonds." Actually it's 5 percent. That to me made perfect sense.

I was a little tiny bit disappointed that [Bush] didn't speak more forcefully against RU-486. Abortion is abortion whether you do it in a doctor's office or with a pill.

Gore was comically overmade-up, I guess because he was so nervous about sweating. I work in show business every day, and I don't think that I've seen that much makeup on anyone besides a Las Vegas showgirl. I kept waiting for his false eyelashes to fall off.

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