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In all the confusion of the American political contests this week, you likely missed this small nugget: On a midwinter midweek afternoon, when most people were at work or in class, about a thousand West Virginia Republicans somehow found the time to gather in the Charleston Civic Center to make their choices known. Former governor Mitt Romney was far ahead on the first ballot. But forces aligned with Senator John McCain of Arizona, desperate to deny their rivals a victory, abruptly switched allegiance and threw their support to a third man, former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who won the contest and the early headlines on Super Tuesday.

"These are the juvenile antics of a morally bankrupt campaign," John McCutcheon, a senior adviser to Mitt Romney, said of the manoeuvre. "They're spoilers who take the responsibility of being Republicans much less seriously than their own personal gratification, to tactically distort the outcome of the vote for fun.''

Is this any way for the world's greatest power to select its next leader?

A nation with nuclear weapons, with the most important currency on the globe, with military forces engaged in battles in two countries half a world away, with the power to shape the culture and tastes of people in lands whose existence it hardly acknowledges, chooses its president in a process less sophisticated and less logical than that employed to choose the queen of the Carnaval de Québec Öin the 1950s.

Last Tuesday's farrago of primaries and caucuses put the entire process — the frantic campaigning, the fevered charges and countercharges, the riot of different rules for different states and different parties — on naked display. It was not pretty. It wasn't even efficient.

Several years ago I covered a Canadian election, making stops with party leaders in Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, and the whole thing was so crisp, so streamlined, so businesslike — most of all, so brief — that I thought that surely I was missing something. Where was the chaos? Where was the confusion? Where was the exhaustion? Where was the patchwork of some places that voted by proportional representation, some by a winner-take-all scheme and still others in a first-past-the-post system by legislative district?

The clarity of it all — the utter simplicity — on the northern side of the 49th parallel seemed to me a beautiful thing to behold. Or at least reasonably easy to understand.

Think of it this way. The Canadian system is hockey. The team with the most pucks in the net wins. The American system is baseball. One league has a designated hitter, the other doesn't. Pitches batted into foul territory count as strikes, except when they don't. A ball popped up in the infield can be a hit or an out, except if there is a force play at third and there are fewer than two outs.

I've covered American politics for more than a third of a century, and it was only recently that I figured out that the process of selecting presidential nominees is less a matter of reason than of rhythm. In fact, the lyrics of Gershwin's classic Fascinating Rhythm — written in 1924, the year the Democrats required 103 ballots to select their nominee — speak of "what a mess you're makin'," an apt description of what Senators McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and Governors Romney and Huckabee have been doing since New Year's.

A SYSTEM THAT IS NO SYSTEM

Here's how the fascinating rhythm works: The campaign starts quietly and slowly, in two out-of-the-way states that have a peculiar hold on American politics. For months, maybe even a year, candidates trek to the faraway hills of New Hampshire and to the quiet homesteads of Iowa. The candidates sit down in coffee shops and living rooms, speaking with voters in small groups of five or six, submitting themselves to questions and entreaties and some of the best pastry and the worst coffee in all the world. In Iowa the talk is often of agricultural policy, almost never the forte of Washington politicians, who barely know the difference between price supports and athletic supporters. In New Hampshire the talk is always about taxes, and the candidates are supposed to be against them, all of them, in all forms, direct and indirect.

This may seem like a quaint tradition, but the campaigns in Iowa and New Hampshire make or break candidates — not only because they can propel a contender toward the nomination or toward oblivion, but also because the experience of being tested by earnest voters who jealously guard their power to influence the nation's politics often marks a candidate deeply. It never fails to bring a fancy-pants Washington politician down to earth when he presses his expensive polished wing-tips into the manure of an Iowa soybean farm.

Strategists call the first phase of the campaign retail politics. They call the next phase, which began with the Super Tuesday contests, wholesale politics. It's the difference between a dépanneur and Canadian Tire.

Once the campaign moves into the wholesale phase, it becomes a helter-skelter schedule of flying visits, news conferences on airport tarmacs, giant rallies in arenas and stilted, staged visits to factories, hospitals and high-tech workplaces. Senator Gary Hart, who mounted two presidential campaigns in the 1980s, used to say that he had to look at the phone book in his hotel room in the morning to figure out where he was.

Nobody designed this system, hardly anyone can explain it and almost no one can defend it.

Adlai Stevenson, the brainy Illinois governor who twice was the Democratic nominee in the 1950s, once said that a presidential campaign was an education in America. But that was before the homogenization of the U.S. made the towns hugging the airport in Minneapolis look almost identical to those hugging the airport in St. Louis.

A TEST OF CHARACTER?

Commentators often say that such a campaign provides a character test for the rigours and challenges of the presidency. But it takes a leap of logic (and, probably, faith) to see how a sure-footed response in a televised debate gives any insight into how a president might choose a cabinet, react to a terrorist attack, respond to faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction or prepare a budget that addresses the huge demographic pressures from the retirement of the baby boomers.

This is an unusual election, full of both issues and themes. The next president must deal with the growing appetite for a dramatic overhaul of a health-care system among a group of people without insurance that is 50 per cent bigger than the entire population of Canada. The next president must repair relations overseas, and in North America as well. The next president will almost certainly be elected during a recession that will raise questions about the structural health of the U.S. economy in a world that is growing smaller even as it grows more competitive.

As for this election's huge themes, the Democrats are grappling with whether to select the first female presidential nominee or the first black nominee. The Republicans are wrestling with the exhaustion and expiration of the Reagan Revolution, waiting for the next new idea that might solidify their claim to be the natural party of government.

To sort through all this, the candidates who remain in the field as the campaign moves this week to a Chesapeake trifecta of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia must slog through a complex process that rewards the accumulation of delegates that can be redeemed at the two national conventions, the Republicans' in Minnesota and the Democrats' in Colorado.

No wonder there is confusion outside the United States. There is utter confusion inside the United States. The process is as dysfunctional as it is colourful. But all the proposed reforms have problems of their own.

A single national primary would reward a candidate with the big money to buy big media ads. A series of regional primaries might exaggerate regional interests. The imperfections of the way we vote now may be more appealing than any of the remedies.

One episode captures the essence of the American electoral system. In 1988, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas was falling further and further behind in his effort to wrest the Republican nomination away from George H.W. Bush.

He was struggling to regain his political equilibrium and, he hoped, his momentum. His campaign was in shambles. His aides were feuding. No one could decide what he should say or even where he should go. So he took control of his campaign and his destiny. He wandered into the cockpit of his campaign plane, pointed to the west and told the captain: "Fly that way for a while.'' That's the American system. We fly this way for a while, and then that way for a while and somehow we stumble upon a nominee and say that the people have spoken and that the ancient principles of the Founding Fathers have been refreshed. No one ever said America wasn't a miracle.

David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for his analytic reporting on U.S. politics.