Morgan and I were talking about this and that, and our conversation drifted to politics and the truism that people who want to be prime minister or president are, by definition, unqualified for the job.

Suddenly, with the clarity you only get in one of those movies where a heavenly choir starts singing and a light shines down on you from on high and a little voice in your head says "I have a message from god for you, sign here," I realized that what we all need is a policical lottery.

Not the kind you read about in silly SF stories where one person is randomly chosen to become president by computer (and just who programs those computers, I wonder?). No, what we need is primary lotteries, instead of caucuses or primary elections or whatever.

Let's say that members of a political party are strictly limited to those individuals who donate at least 250 hours of unpaid political volunteer work each year to the party of their choice (that's five hours a week). If you don't donate your work, you don't belong. And if you belong, you have a membership card with a number on it.

For any election, when the time comes to select the members of the party who will be running for office, you hold a lottery. You know, where all these ping pong balls with numbers printed on them get whooshed around in giant pyrex popcorn poppers and a woman who wasn't vapid enough to turn the letters around like Vanna White goes, microphone in hand, from one pyrex machine to another to read off the number of the ball that pops out first.

The party member whose number matches the one generated by the lottery gets to be the candidate for their party, whether she or he wants to or not.

Of course, the system as described has flaws. What if Martha Stewart or Bill Gates held the winning number? Worse, what if such people held the winning number for all the major parties? Also, what if the person who won the lottery in the last election is doing a really good job?

Well, the Bill Gates problem would probably not arise. People like that need those five hours a week to count their money, and besides, there's nothing to prevent them from giving money to the party instead, which would of course buy them influence as usual but wouldn't allow them to become candidates. And face it, what most of these people want is to have influence rather than actually become a politician.

And if someone wins the lottery and does a really good job, I do feel that she should be allowed the chance to keep her job. On the ballot, you would have the lottery winner for each party, and then you would have a space labeled "The incumbent," with the name of the current holder of the office, regardless of whether the incumbent wanted to stand for re-election or not. So the voters could easily vote to keep people who were doing a good job, and throw out people who weren't. Yes, this means that the incumbent would be running against someone else in her party, as well as against the opposition. So what?

I think this system would be a great hit in America -- I mean, we Americans are so fond of talking about how any American child can dream of growing up to become president, just like any American can dream of winning their dream home, or at least their dream car, in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. This system would make that bit of fanciful balderbash actually have some validity.

And think of how much stress reduction the US electorate would enjoy if they no longer had to deal with the agony of a year of election primaries before ever even getting to the torture of the election proper.

Finally, selecting candidates by lottery would greatly reduce the chance of all the candidates being egomaniacs, not to mention complete incompetents.