KEY POINTS:
Inured as we are to American excess, one still raises an eyebrow at the news that the US is to stage the world's first billion-dollar election. Nineteen months out from polling day, the campaign is barely into the phoney war phase.
The candidates are just combing through each
other's secret histories in search of ammunition for the inevitable smear campaigns, yet they're already sitting on a combined war-chest of almost $140 million, which is more than the total amount spent on Britain's 2005 general election.
There are various ways of looking at this. Those disinclined to overlook the obvious will see it as further evidence Americans have more money than sense.
Others will view it as more serious, indeed sinister: proof America's political process has been hijacked by big business, and the White House is just another upmarket property for sale to the highest bidder.
It might even be argued that, since what happens in America tends to be mimicked on a lesser scale throughout the Western world, we're witnessing the slide into decadence of a political system which was thought to offer mankind's best hope for a civilised society based on the rule of law.
Does the billion-dollar election mean that government by and for the people has been superseded by plutocracy?
Democracy American-style has its flaws but in some ways it's more open than ours. Apart from people born outside the US and convicted criminals, pretty much anyone can run for president.
To be Prime Minister of New Zealand, you have to be a Member of Parliament. Until the National Party began sourcing its leaders from the world of high finance, you virtually had to be a career politician.
Non, or anti-politicians, like Jesse Jackson, Ross Perot, and Ralph Nader have had a significant impact on recent presidential elections. Bill Clinton might have been the proverbial political animal but going from the governor's mansion in Alabama to the White House is like the Mayor of Invercargill becoming Prime Minister, and we wouldn't contemplate that in our wildest moments. Would we?
The primary system might enable a maverick and a greenhorn - John McCain and Barack Obama respectively - to become their party's presidential candidates.
They don't have to be anointed by shadowy power brokers and backed by a majority of their congressional colleagues because the public, or in some states registered party members, will decide.
As in the America's Cup, a host of elimination races will determine the finalists. And like the America's Cup, democracy on that scale doesn't come cheap.
There is much to mock in American elections. The religiosity, the sentimentality, the parading of the candidates' families, the patriotic one-upmanship which bears out Samuel Johnson's dictum that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, and would-be leaders of the free world who make weathervanes look stubborn.
Mitt Romney ran for governor of liberal Massachusetts in 2002 as a social moderate. He's now seeking the Republican nomination (a big ask, as they say, without the support of the evangelical right) as a social conservative, after reversing his position on abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, and gun control.
Stand by for his announcement that, on reflection and after deep and meaningful - if somewhat one-sided conversations - with God, he now believes there really were such people as Adam and Eve.
We shouldn't be too smug. Why else do we have MMP if not for the reason that our major parties had no qualms about promising one thing during the campaign and doing the opposite once safely installed in government?
Democracy is far from perfect. It is open to manipulation; it is susceptible to demagoguery; the ongoing popularity contest is often banal and sometimes contemptible. It has delivered an era in which inequalities of wealth seem to be widening rather than shrinking.
But whose fault is it? How do we apportion blame between the system and the people, between the politicians and those they supposedly serve?
To what extent do democracy's current failings reflect society's apathy and mindless preoccupations?
America considers itself the home of democracy, holding ballots for everything from dog-catcher to sheriff. But the voter turnout in recent presidential elections has barely reached 50 per cent. That's probably a more relevant number than the billion dollars about to be splurged.
The German economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe called democracy "the God that failed" but as E.M. Forster pointed out democracy "does not divide its people into the bossers and the bossed as an efficiency regime tends to do".
In his famous essay What I Believe, written in the fateful year 1939, Forster called for "two cheers for democracy, one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough; there is no occasion to give three."
