Who will be the next president?

Now that the race for the Democratic party's nomination is settled, we can begin asking the question, "Who will be the next president?" And, we may also ask, "Does it matter very much?"

The historic nature of the presumptive nomination of Barack Obama, the first African American to win a major party nod for president, will soon be overshadowed by the perceived leadership qualities of Obama versus John McCain.

As Gene Healy has pointed out in The Cult of the Presidency, Americans have come to regard the presidency as a sort of national messiahship, and over the last century most occupants of the office have responded by feeding the illusion one fallible human being can wave a magic wand and solve all our problems.

Both Obama and McCain will play to that century-old illusion, albeit in different ways. Once in office, either Obama or McCain will set about expanding the power and influence of the office, as have most of their predecessors starting with Teddy Roosevelt. And, at some point during his first or second term, a majority of Americans will be disillusioned thoroughly and long for the next national messiah to arrive on the scene.

And the cycle will repeat itself until we Americans grow up a bit and understand that individuals can solve their own problems, left alone and reasonably free to do so by government, but others cannot. This is the fundamental message both of classical liberalism and Buddhism, philosophies with very different cultural points of origin.

Who the next president is will matter in terms of whether there is more or less mischief visited on peaceful individuals here and people living in other countries, but not in epic, sweeping change. Obama in particular is attempting to depict this presidential election in that way, as epic legend in the making. McCain's approach is dialed a bit lower, but the same cultural motif is there. Seeing oneself as an epic hero or messiah is, by definition, demented, so what are we to make of the psychological profiles of these two men, one of whom will be the next president?

The relevant question we should ask ourselves, rather than who should be president, is "Why do we need an elected monarch at all? Isn't it time we moved on to a different, less authoritarian structure?"

My solution would be the plural presidency as pioneered in Switzerland. But only a change in our cultural expectations can bring about something as sane and rational as a committee exercising federal executive power by consensus. That change has to come from us, ordinary Americans.

Otherwise, this boom-and-bust cycle of high expectation, magical illusion and delusion, and bitter disappointment will continue for a long time.