A set of half-a-dozen or so candidates goes into the primaries as potential winners. Last time they were McCain, Romney, Guiliani, Obama, Edwards, and Clinton. Those were the only people who could have become president. The composition of that set of people is more-or-less outside the power of any democratic activity. The people who decide that are the only real voters.
Instead we should have a call-in show like American Idol, where any talented young American could win?
Each of those 'finalists' you mention won many elections to lower offices before becoming credible presidential candidates. That process may be long and arcane and in many ways twisted/irrational, but it's definitely democratic as well.
I'm not pretending there's a good alternative. Assigning a head of state to 300 million people is necessarily undemocratic. 1/300,000,000th of a vote? I have more effect on public life by bitching about parking meter tickets.
The real solution is moving power to smaller bodies...states, then municipalities....
But what happens then is that municipalities are going to need to coordinate their actions. They set up higher level bodies and those set up even higher level coordinating entities. You get a pyramid of layers delegating power and the entire thing becomes intransparent and corrupt. That's how the the soviet union "worked". "Soviet" actually means "workers council" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_%28council%29). To a lesser degree that's what the EU suffers from. Citizens have no way of influencing the most powerful institutions directly and therefore these institutions seem remote and aloof.
But it didn't work that way at all. Government action didn't start with the Worker's Council; it started with the Poliburo.
They liked the term 'democratic centralism', which meant that it was just like a Democracy except that you couldn't vote, but you were allowed to say anything you wanted as long as you didn't say anything negative about the state. It's very streamlined!
Of course it didn't work that way in reality, but it was meant to work that way. What I'm saying is exactly that a corrupt undemocratic top down system can be the result of a dysfunctional bottom up system that has too many layers. But I see that my post didn't make that clear at all.
