A third-party candidate could get enough votes in a key swing state in November to toss the presidency to the otherwise loser.
By Harold Meyerson
March 20, 2012

Are political centrists in America without a political home? Do we need a third-party presidential candidate to represent those socially progressive, fiscally austere voters who find our two parties too extreme?

There's no disputing that the Republican Party continues to move rightward at warp speed. Virtually every GOP elected official who's been in office for more than a couple of years has had to repudiate previously mainstream Republican positions (such as creating a health insurance system with an individual mandate, an idea cooked up by a right-wing think tank) to keep today's more rabid Republican activists from challenging them in party primaries or caucuses. Such longtime conservative stalwarts as Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana could lose their party's renomination this spring from just such challenges.

In this year's GOP presidential primaries, each of the four candidates has attacked the others only from the right. Logic suggests that every GOP candidate cannot be to the right of every other GOP candidate, but if that's what this year's Republican base demands — and it is — then logic be damned: Everyone is running to the right.

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But the myth exists that the Democrats are as radical as the Republicans, despite data collected by political scientists Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker showing that congressional Republicans have galloped much further right in recent decades than congressional Democrats have to the left. Nonetheless, some very wealthy Americans, declaring themselves the excluded center, have ponied up for a new proto-party for the mythically missing center. It's called Americans Elect.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-americans-elect-20120320,0,4401248.story