In some polls--and I think we can all agree without resorting to Harley's PhD dissertations (complete with flow-charts) that polls provide only the sketchiest outline of the electorate--as many as 20% of voters are considering voting for a third-party candidate in this election; this from the weakest field of such pretenders in recent history. Yet given both the obvious relative disaffection for both candidates by the general public, what can be done? Are there no alternatives to the deeply flawed, unfit, and untrustworthy John McCain and Barrack Obama?

As the rank and file of both parties, balking and bellowing like cattle, are herded reluctantly into the conventions engineered to anoint both candidates, a few second thoughts are in order. In the case of the Democrats, whose turn comes first, the 'super-delegate' system was created specifically to avert the very slow-motion train-wreck which is about to overtake the party. Super-delegates' pledged votes can be rescinded at any time before they are cast, and Obama cannot win without them. While this runs contra to the Democrats' nonsensical claims of a more democratic primary process (Obama, in any case, has a minority of primary votes cast and could not have won without the decidedly undemocratic caucuses), throwing this back into the traditional smoke-filled rooms of the nominating process might produce a far better choice for voters. After all, this is the same process that selected FDR and JFK. On the Republican side, options are more limited. Their primary process was designed to produce an early winner--and it did. Now they have to live with it. But a rebellion in the ranks might still produce a candidate they can live with.

Right now, both conventions present astonishing prospective spectacles. On the one hand, you have a tightly controlled and choreographed event culminating in a mass-rally at a stadium (but hopefully not a torchlight parade), with dissent carefully controlled and social realist symbols on display everywhere. After flirting with two Virginians for vice-president and apparently rejecting Indiana's appealing Birch Bayh, Obama's people are now seemingly floating, or perhaps merely hang-gliding, the idea of former presidential candidate John Kerry for vice-president. I doubt he will be the final choice, but the mere entertainment of such a notion shows just clueless this campaign organization really is.

On the other hand, you have an event that will closely resemble a cast reunion of the 'Night of the Living Dead' films. Never in the history of the Republican Party, not even in '96 when loathing for the Clintons at least galvanized the Dole campaign into some grotesque Frankenstein's monster semblance of vitality, have I seen GOP party pros less enthused about a nominating convention. The prospect is so appalling, merely from a media event standpoint, that I may tune in just to appreciate the sheer horror of it all. Party insiders are reportedly desperately angling for Minnesota's Governor Pawlenty to be second man on the ticket, hoping that McCain will collapse on the campaign trail, leaving the younger man as the actual candidate; McCain's latest trial balloon of an idea is to announce that he will serve only one term--which is quite a tacit admission of just how miserable the two candidates really are and just how much politicians in general are now despised (the only public approval ratings lower than President Bush's are those of Congress) that this would actually be considered an attractive selling point.

The latest Republican rumor of McCain's preference for a vice-presidential pick is his old friend, the former Democrat and senator, Joe Lieberman. Words cannot express what a pointless and--at least among the Republican base--unpopular choice this would be. The thought of an Obama-Kerry vs McCain-Lieberman contest puts the lie to any myth of change by either party. Yet, ironically, I believe that it may well be Lieberman who holds the key to the voter's salvation. In a sense he is the first 'post-modern' political candidate. Because it was Lieberman who, after being rejected for his party's nomination to his own senate seat, shifted gears to easily win it back in the general election as an 'Independent Democrat'. And I believe that this is the path that the disaffected in both parties need to follow.

On the Republican side, the process should have already started. There are several prospective candidates for the 'Independent Republican' nomination who are starting to look mighty good right about now, Huckabee for one. Tom Coburn for another. And what about Fred Thompson? Younger than McCain, at least, and no unhealthier. Can at least read a teleprompter. Teamed with an attractive female vice-president like Condoleezza Rice (who would say yes) or Sarah Palin (who might not), he might actually win a plurality. On the 'Independent Democrat' side I can't think of a more attractive alternative than Jim Webb-Kathleen Sibelius. But the Democrats actually have a much larger field to work with, including several African-American candidates more appealing than the haughty half-white Obama.

And finally, it may be too late to get their names on the ballot in many states, but a vigorous write-in campaign could still propel a third-party ticket such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu into a plurality of any general election vote. Bloomberg has the money to do it. A Democrat-turned Republican, a fiscal conservative slightly to the right of the Dems on foreign affairs but liberal on every other issue, Bloomberg now appears an adult indeed compared to the two self-centered and politically immature prima donnas we are faced with electing (incredible that after all his years of experience McCain could be termed so, but alas, he is). Maybe it's time for an adult to be running things. And Mary Landrieu (constantly on the verge of leaving the party anyway), easily the most physically attractive woman in politics, would lend him the conservative ballast he needs to compete in the Red States.

And why shouldn't we choose from some or all of the above? Isn't the Coke-vs-Pepsi model just a little flawed for a new century? Europeans choose from among a half-dozen party candidates; even Russia's Potemkin Village elections feature more major candidates than ours. Maybe the 'us-and-them' mentality is a little last-century--maybe we need to think in terms of coalitions for the next.

Ideas, anyone? Or is it just too late?
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