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McCain/Bradley in 2008, the Centrist Ticket. Let'em come to an agreement between themselves as to who becomes President and who becomes Vice President (they could, for example, let the Senate decide it, the Vice President being President of the Senate). They're both smart, rational, intelligent moderates with ethics.
Think about it.
Oh, sure, the DNC and RNC would both have a cerebral aneurysm. But if we -- all of us -- could talk the two of them into it, it might be just the sort of unifying move this country needs.
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Sorry, useless. Too busy now and this weekend to expand, but ... it's useless. Care locally first.
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I'm thinking Jillete / Teller '08 for Libertarian. :)
-Ogre
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Can you just imagine Henry loose in the Senate? *cackle*
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What planet do you live on?
-JDF
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The Centrists don't exist yet, except as a concept in my (and presumably others) head. If they're going to happen, they need to happen the old fashioned way - from the bottom up.
We CANNOT affect change at the top if we do not have something solid to stand on. That is a very real problem that the majority of the independant and marginalized parties have. Please do not take a potential hope for change, in the form of a rational, moderate party, and give it the same handicap, because you will wind up with the same lack of results.
Can you help to build a solid, heavy-duty base in the next two years? One where we get into the local city & county politics, and the unglamourous state positions? One where we can be seen as a real option, a party that does real work, people that are just people? If that can be done, then sure, in four years we can field the high-face positions.
The other option is to recruit people who are otherwise already democrats and republicans and - this is the catch here - convince them to bring their voters with them. It's not all about face, here. It's about the voters recognizing us, trusting us, and realizing that we ARE them. And we can't do that, until they see us working right next to them on the projects that they actually care about.
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So tell me something. How are you going to get people involved without telling them what the goal is? Without showing them the concrete goal of what can happen if they work together?
You've got to show the stars if you want someone to build the rocket ship.
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Don't forget the obvious ... the electoral college system requires a state-level elector from the party to be able to cast the votes for the presidental candidate.
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Point two: You've got to have a goal to offer people. If all you can tell them is, "Well, we're going to work hard in low-level local positions, and maybe in two years, or four, or maybe ten, we'll be in a position to start running for an office or two in the state legislature," a heck of a lot of people are going to say, "Well, call me back in two, or four, or maybe ten years, then."
Point three: Getting a moderate Republican to run with a moderate Democrat, you've already got the base -- all the moderates of BOTH parties. That's a far bigger base than you could reasonably expect to build in 20 years, let alone two or four. A large part of the problem in today's politics is that both major parties have radicalized their platforms, trying to appeal to the ends of the bell curve. This is a sound strategy only as long as no-one's representing the center. A centrist ticket like this could well pull in enough of the moderate voters in the middle of the bell curve to totally steamroller both the far left and the far right, and maybe even a lot of people who aren't voting at all right now because they don't think any candidate who has a chance represents them.
Point four: OK, it may not work. But is it mutually exclusive with starting over from the ground up? No. Frankly, what you're proposing is a long-term strategy -- and to be brutally honest, you're dreaming if you think you can build a big enough ground-level base to affect anything at the national level in two years. (King County, maybe. Washington State? Just barely possibly, if you get REAL lucky and if you manage to round up a lot of funding. Congress in two years? Forget it.) This is a short-term top-down stopgap that can happen at the same time as your long-term bottom-up plan, takes nothing away from it, and may just make it easier for you to do it and buy you more time to do it. Remember, there's no law that ways you have to put all your eggs in one basket. People who shrug off one approach as a waste of time may be willing to put something into another.
Point five: You said, "The other option is to recruit people who are otherwise already democrats and republicans and - this is the catch here - convince them to bring their voters with them." What, precisely, do you think this suggestion is proposing DOING, if not exactly that?
:)
It's just starting from the other end of the table, is all.