An idea whose time has come?

[unixronin]

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.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Point one: I tossed it out there to get people thinking. I think the chances of it actually happening are slim. However, see point four.

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.