Centerfield

Interesting idea. It would be tough to convince either of those guys to do it -- but I wonder if they might if they knew the other was on board.

Also, there's the sticky issue of who's on the top of the ticket. They're both national figures -- probably McCain slightly moreso than Lieberman.

The logic of a three-way race would seem to suggest putting the Republican on top -- it's harder to draw votes away from the president than the challenger. If you don't pull a good number of Republican votes, you just end up reelecting the president.

Anyway, those are perhaps too serious thoughts for such an unlikely scenario. In a broader sense, though, I have wondered if it might be possible to run an independent in 2004. If the Democratic nomination goes to Dean, we have quite a "left vs. right" contest that leaves the middle wide open for someone to fill.

Is there any significant possibility of convincing a quality centrist candidate to run as an independent? That question is worth examining closely.

FYI -- I'm also adding Begging to Differ to our centrist blogroll. They seem to be quite thoughtful, informed, and independent-minded. A nice addition, it seems to me.

>>>Permanent third parties seems to be impossible under our winner-take-all system. But ad hoc tickets are possible...

Dead on target! Let us not forget that of the last three presidential elections, third party ad-hoc candidacies decided two of them even though the mavericks couldn't win. Perot in '92 split off enough centrist populists to sink Bush Sr., and Nader took more than enough votes from Gore in Florida (and a few other states) to sink Gore in 2000.

Worth noting is that in both cases the "insurgent" third party candidates sank incumbents.

And well worth exploring is why--in both cases it was essentially internal "house revolts" by people who felt disenfranchised by their own parties. (By that I mean the voters, not the candidates.) In Perot's case the voters came mostly from the middle, centrist populists revolting against the Moral Majority faction seizing the reins in the GOP. In Nader's case it was mostly the far left, people who felt betrayed by the solidly centrist agenda-seizing of the Clintonites and the DLC. Ironically, their support of Nader cost them a much more liberal (than Clinton) candidate in Gore.

Lots of very good points, Tully.

To this point, we haven't heard any rumblings of a moderate or centrist emerging and running as an independent. So the first question is, of course, who would do it?

Maybe Lieberman or McCain. I share the enthusasm for the idea of both guys doing this together. That helps with the issue of drawing too much from one side of the aisle or the other.

I would also observe that Angus King was a very popular independent governor of Maine, but was term-limited out of his job in 2002. I saw an interview with him the other night, and the guy is really quite sharp. It would be difficult to run someone who doesn't have strong foreign policy credentials, but on all other fronts he's almost ideal -- executive experience, very popular in office, with a strong policy record.

Who else can we think of who might be a credible independent candidate in 2004?

There is no way McCain would do this.

I agree that there's no way McCain would do this. He wouldn't be disloyal to his party, especially while it held the presidency. The only way he'd do something like this would be if he had a serious disagreement of conscience, and that's not the case here.

But I think the arguments that a 3rd party can't be sustained or have a chance in a Presidential election are pretty weak. Mostly they are based on the outcome of a handful of elections.

The impact of centrist and/or independent voters has been to decide the outcome of several of the last few elections, and as someone else pointed out, 3rd party candidates have siphoned enough votes to help swing things the other way for at least Bill Clinton and GW.

I have no doubt at all that a truly good centrist candidate who didn't pander to any of the wingnuts but took his or her pragmatic ordinary american case right to the people could win. The optimum setting for this to happen would be in an election where a two-term president was stepping down and both parties fielded reactionary wingnuts during a period of high polarization. If polarization were to yield highly contrasting party candates that were fairly unpalatable to the 30-40% of Americans who are unaffiliated, a strong moderate independent could win easily.

Of course, you could argue that it becomes harder and harder as time passes for a reactionary wingnut to get the prez nom, which is probably why 3rd party efforts tend to represent wingnuts. Disenfranchisement happens on the edges, not in the middle.