~by Hannes Artens

I know, pride goes before a fall, and it's arrogant and more often than not outright foolish to count your chickens before they're hatched. And yet with the last debate fought I feel tempted to call the race for the White House. Save a dramatic foreign crisis of Yom Kippur War-dimensions or yet unknown corpses the number of and as shocking as the Manson murders in Barack Obama's closet, he will win November 4 in a landslide (300+ electoral votes). This prediction allows for the racial factor, which I believe to cost Obama between five and seven percentage points. This foregone conclusion three weeks before election day raises the question of whether John McCain was the right candidate for the Republican party? And if not, what lessons for the future we can learn from the 2008 race on how US presidential candidates should be better selected?

During the primaries common wisdom ruled that John McCain was the only Republican to stand a chance against a generic Democrat in a year the GOP brand enjoys the popularity of Chinese dried milk powder and the president is shunned by his own party like a leper. The Republican establishment calculated that given the threat of a liberal White House for 4+ years the Christian right, NRA Rednecks, and Limbaugh-conservatives, who always considered McCain Benedict Arnold reincarnate, would bite the bullet and pull the right lever no matter what. But only McCain with his maverick, cross-partisan appeal would be able to attract enough independents to counter the Democratic enthusiasm edge.

This might haven fallen into place if John McCain still were the unconventional freethinker of the 2000 race, the staunch "country first" patriot above the partisan divide The Writing on the Wall's President Jim Whitman is modeled after. But today's John McCain is neither the maverick of eight years ago nor his fictitious facelift. In order to win the party's faithful McCain pandered to the right as if there were no tomorrow. At times when ideology in politics has become a movable piece of scenery, McCain invested all his rep in polishing his conservative credentials. At times when neo-con dreams of empire are discredited for good by an unjustified war of aggression and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy that has left America more feared in the world than Iran's nuclear program he abandoned all pragmatism and out-righted William Kristol and Robert Kagan. At times when President Bush enjoys lower approval ratings than Richard Nixon after being caught red handed in plumbing work and Ronald Reagan selling arms to Stars-and-Stripes-burning mullahs combined, McCain cozied up to Bush on every matter important in Americans' minds and opposed him on easily forgotten.

And yet not even this brownnosing beyond tolerability carried the day for him. John McCain won the Republican laurel not by default but by the incapacity of his strongest opponent. Rudy Giuliani's "Florida firewall" campaign strategy will prove a study case of miscalculation in political primers for generations. But McCain's excessive pandering, demagogy, betrayal of his own ideals and values, and sickening flip-flopping came at a heavy price: he lost all favor with the media, his afore strongest asset.

The extent the McCain brand has squandered it with the Fourth Estate is best illustrated in the above picture - even after a debate, I think, he won thanks to Obama's insufferable flatness, this is the image that dominates coverage. All politicians are human beings. They make gaffes, pick their noses or appear else less photogenic (when they stumble and grimace, for example). That doesn't matter as long as you have the mainstream media on your side, protectively editing or cutting such embarrassing moments. Once you have them turned against you, though, and they've become a pack of bloodhounds salivating for the next blunder to confirm an image they've created and that has established itself in the public mind - John McGrumpy, acting like an erratic Rumpelstiltskin - you can only throw the towel. You're done.

This media bias, as a response to John McCain betraying his own values and the hundreds of journalists who once cheered the Straight Talk Express as new, honest, and principled politics, together with a history of two and a half decades of championing deregulation when the repercussions of repealing Glass-Steagall are blowing up in our all faces, were the nails in McCain's coffin. The fact that he exacerbated this image with his own plain gross performance, him being a poor orator, his campaign contradicting and ridiculing itself every other week (economic fundamentals strong, lifelong experience as #1 selling point and then nominating Sarah Palin, etc.), his going negative with shelf warmers of allegations when millions of Americans are frightened to frenzy for losing their homes and 401(k)s, and him being the least apt candidate to weather an economic crisis (in retrospect, Mitt Romney might have been the sole Republican to benefit from this Black September) were only flavor enhancers. In actual fact, John McCain buried his campaign long before he embarked on it.

McCain's fate points us to an inherent deficit in the way American parties select their presidential candidates. Given a division of the American electorate of roughly 30-40-30 for Dems-Indies-GOP, the current selection system is neither up-to-date nor suitable to elect the candidate with the best chances in November. Two major points are generally brought up against the current primaries system: it is too long (thus cost-intensive) and gives disproportional importance to a small number of states that neither reflect the American political landscape in a nutshell nor are make-or-break states for either party. Together Iowa and New Hampshire constitute less than 1.5 percent of eligible voters and yet they are given the roles of kingmakers (the Hawkeye State put Obama on par with Clinton, and the Granite State saved McCain from annihilation). This year's drawn-out primary battle bestowed upon us the fail-safe interest killer of more than 30 televised debates and 20 months of non-stop-campaigning. That's excruciating for the candidates, not yielding desired results, and insufferable even for political junkies with zero private life.

The reform proposals from both parties are legion. The DNC's recent attempt to broaden the approach by including Western states early in the calendar belly-flopped. Others suggest a nation-wide primary on one single day, states grouped by size with the smallest going first, or the nation being divided into four or five regions and they voting in random rotation. Neither of these models, however, address the fundamental dilemma, that became McCain's undoing: to strike a balance between the selection process reflecting the will of the majority of the party and choosing a candidate with the potential to shine beyond its mere core, attract independents and swing voters in battleground states.

Here's my proposal: individualize the process and make it more flexible. It's incomprehensible that both parties are condemned to nearly always hold their primaries in the same states on the same day. Different states matter to each party (and, at the end of the day, Iowa and New Hampshire hardly to either), and swing states are that really count. So let's divide the 50 into five groups with primaries held on five consecutive weekends from April on (this cuts the silly season between the primaries and the conventions short by 2+ months). Each group consists of at least three swing states, four core states, and three also runs for each party respectively, based on the results of the previous race. Each group should aim for a geographical and numerical balance in electoral votes as close as possible. For the Democrats the first weekend of April thus could look like something along these lines: NV (5), PA (21), FL (27), ME (4), DE (3), IL (21), WA (11), KY (8), MS (6), ID (4). The Republicans could go for the same three swing states (given both parties can agree on the same 15 states and a common calendar for those) or pick others, may concentrate on GA, WV, NE, and AZ as their core states, and could add HI, MD, and MA for good measure. Needless to say that the allocation of states would change every four years depending on the parties' prioritization.

Admitted, this would significantly increase travel and ad costs for the hopefuls. This disadvantage for lesser known candidates, however, would be compensated by shortening the campaign season. There's no need for getting into gear before after New Year and for the first debate being held sooner than early February. As a second step I would mandate all primaries to be semi-closed, which means open for registered voters of the respective party and independents only, to counter strategic vote-setting and generate the most expressive results possible.

Personally and as a European, I think the primary system of the public selecting their presidential candidates in open, democratic contests one of the most attractive feature of the American political system - in Austria, the heads of four major parties were replaced this month; the decisions were made by a handful of heavyweights in backrooms and delegates are expected to rubberstamp it some when in the distant future, no questions asked. But even a system as egalitarian as the American primaries are in urgent need of reform and to be freed from its tight corset. My proposal, I believe, would make the selection process more democratic, more reflective of each party's priorities and of the political composition of the American public at large, but, perhaps most importantly, shorten it, make it less expansive, all the while more expressive for the general election ahead by giving the 40% percent independents of the electorate the weight that is due to them.

I look forward to getting Agonistas' thoughts on this model and discuss it with you below.

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Hannes Artens is the author of The Writing on the Wall, the first anti-Iran-war novel.