Because we’re down to four in the presidential race — Mike Huckabee’s and Ron Paul’s wishes notwithstanding — this seems like the right time to share my thoughts on how the rest of the primary season will unfold, and what ought to happen if we’re truly interested in the change that everyone keep yammering about. (Yeah, like you’ve been trembling with anticipation of this moment.)

I think Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, for the simple reason that her ruthlessness (as well as her husband’s) will give her the edge over Barack Obama. As the Clintons demonstrated in South Carolina, they’ll do and say whatever they have to in order to win — and the fact that she didn’t win there shouldn’t be construed as evidence that fighting dirty won’t work. Obama would have triumphed in South Carolina in any event, and the margin might have been even greater had Hillary and Bill been sweet and polite. In fact, I’ll be surprised if the Democratic race even turns out to be close. Hillary will play the gender card, and Bill has already done the heavy lifting on marginalizing Obama as an ethnic candidate with no real chance to win a general election. Obama will be out of the race well before the convention.

The Republican race will be much closer, mostly because Huckabee will hang in to siphon off enough votes so that neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney goes into the convention with enough delegates to claim the nomination. If that happens, Romney will get it because Huckabee’s delegates will decide he’s the lesser of two evils. But until that moment, McCain will get the most coverage and attention from the media, because both his comeback and personal heroism are great stories. The effect of that coverage will be to disguise the profound ambivalence many conservatives have about McCain, which will eventually cost him the nomination.

Unless.

Imagine this scenario: McCain, sensing that he will need to make a bold and dramatic move prior to the convention, decides to line up his running mate early. He secretly approaches a man that no one in a thousand years would ever have expected him to pick as a vice-president, finds him to be a like-minded soul and a flexible thinker, and together they hatch a plan to deal a death blow to the bitter partisanship that has overtaken Washington. Imagine the reaction when McCain introduces Obama as his running mate.

The zealots in both parties scream in outrage, pundits kick into overdrive and political scientists wring their hands as they ponder the effect on the two-party system. But a huge swath of voters finds appeal, if not outright charm, in a McCain/Obama ticket, and the GOP rank and file eventually (if reluctantly) acknowledge it might be a winner. Hillary Clinton claims, citing no actual proof, that Obama had sought to become her running mate, and that her refusal to add him to her ticket caused him to show his true turncoat colors. But she’s swamped in the election, getting a scant 39 percent of the vote and suffering the worst defeat since Lyndon Johnson beat Barry Goldwater in 1964 (ironic considering she was a “Goldwater Girl” at that time).

Hey, you said you wanted it. How’s that for change?

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