Goldmark: Is 2012 race headed to the House?

Peter Goldmark, a former budget director of New York State and former publisher of the International Herald Tribune, headed the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund.

A friend asked me the other day who I thought would win the presidential election of 2012.

Whoa, I said. That's like asking who will win the World Series -- next year.

But maybe it makes sense to spend a little time thinking about the election of 2012, because the country is in such serious trouble, and there are some wild cards in play.

At the core of the American governmental structure is a system of checks and balances on the exercise of power. And this generates in turn the requirement for a strong and sustained national consensus before any serious new policies can be instituted, since so many different parts of the system have to agree on moving forward.

Today we're in deep economic and financial difficulty, and strong new policies are needed. By "new" policies, I don't mean revolutionary. I mean commonsense policies that are long overdue: emphasizing investment rather than consumption as the engine of growth, not spending more than we take in, and slowly working down our crippling operating deficit and excessive national debt. We're also deeply divided politically -- and therefore paralyzed. So the primary job of the man or woman elected president in November 2012 will be to overcome our divisions and unite us around a strong, common program of serious action.

So what does the field look like?

The Republican jousting has started. Candidates are performing various versions of the "veer-to-the-right" required by the strong role of the extreme right in their party's selection process. Several of them are so extreme as to virtually guarantee their inability to pull the country together around a serious program aimed at economic growth and financial stability should they be elected.

If re-elected, President Barack Obama will have to act much more forcefully to mobilize a consensus, and argue much more aggressively and convincingly against the forces of extremism and paralysis, than he has to date. We simply don't know today whether he will -- or even can -- do that.

But I think there will be serious third- and even fourth-party candidates. The mixture of a country in trouble, the volatility and unpredictability of the political landscape, and the lack of commanding candidates on the scene adds up to a heady invitation to others to conclude that this is the time for them to run outside the two main parties. Efforts in that direction have already started -- see Americanselect.org -- and there will be more.

All that in turn produces the real possibility of a result we haven't seen for nearly two centuries in this country: an election in which no one gains a majority of electoral votes and therefore is thrown into the House of Representatives.

The Constitution provides that if there is no winner in the Electoral College, then the election shall be decided by the House of Representatives. Each state votes as a unit, casting its single vote for one of the top three candidates in the general election. Its choice is determined by a vote of the members of the House delegation from that state. In other words: To win, a candidate must get 26 votes out of the 50 states, and the House members from each state vote as a caucus to determine which candidate gets their state's vote.

This is a sobering thought. Our current House of Representatives is dominated by the extreme right of the Republican Party. Will the House elected in November 2012 be similar?

What we need to move forward is a strong national consensus that most of us can feel comfortable with, and it's hard for me to believe that a candidate chosen by an extremist bloc would do anything other than continue to divide us.

The tea party crowd may get what it wants in the ninth inning after all, but the result may be to paralyze us even further.