Gearing Up For Election 2016

LONDON - There was a moment between the dawning realization that Barack Obama had won and the networks calling the election when a sudden flurry of online postings started speculating about Election 2016.

predicted Ben Collin of Grand Forks, one of many who named the former Florida governor as a shoo-in for the Republican nomination in four years' time.

posted Ethan Zuckerman of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, noting enthusiasm for an all-women Democratic ticket of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren next time around.

Take a breath, America! Give yourselves time to recover from what seemed the longest and certainly was the most expensive campaign in U.S. political history before starting on the next one.

Outsiders frequently express bewilderment at the American predilection for near-permanent electioneering. The rule in Europe and elsewhere is to keep campaigns brief and above all cheap.

The other mystery, of course, is the U.S. political system. Foreign broadcasters traditionally spend much of their U.S. election specials explaining the arcana of the electoral college, only to repeat it all over again every four years because we have forgotten it.

Foreigners are not alone in pondering whether aspects of the American system could do with some updating.

“Anyone who has looked at how elections are run outside the U.S. knows how backward key pillars of our election system are,” Steven Rosenfeld of the progressive AlertNet online magazine wrote before the election.

Citing a range of failings, from underfunded voter registration to obsolete voting machines to corporate campaign funding, he wrote: “Democratic renewal will not happen unless there is a further rebalancing of public and private interests in our political campaigns.”

Others lamented the rigidity of the two-party system.

An Obama supporter, cornered in a Cleveland, Ohio, bar on election night by the BBC, asked why America c ould not be more like, say, Switzerland, with three or even four parties. The two-party system “forces us to pick sides,” he said, “and sometimes there are more than two sides to it.”

Reflecting on the Obama victory from the vantage point of China, John Simpson, the British broadcaster's world affairs editor, suggested the world would probably breathe a collective sigh of relief.

That was not because foreign governments necessarily preferred the Democratic candidate but rather that the choice of the incumbent meant we would not have to wait 18 months for a new president to read himself into his foreign policy portfolio.

By which time, he might have added, U.S. politics would be focused on the midterm elections.

Speculation about the line-up for Election 2016 is unlikely to generate much interest beyond U.S. shores, although Paddypower, the Irish bookie, gamely offered early odds on the outcome.

By Wednesday morning, they were quoting 7 to 1 on Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan, with Donald Trump a rank outsider at 100 to 1.