Unity08 merited an article in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times:
Voter dissatisfaction with some top-tier presidential contenders and with extreme Republican and Democratic partisanship has spawned a Web-based movement to field a bipartisan ticket.[...]
Unity08.com, created in part by former political operatives for the 1976 Ford and Carter campaigns, thinks it has the answer. The group plans to hold an online national primary in June 2008 to select a bipartisan presidential ticket, and is laying plans to begin qualifying for the ballots this fall. Its main requirements: The presidential and vice presidential candidates not be from the same party.
I don’t know how effective Unity08 will actually be. Because their unabashedly centrist/moderate, I suspect they have a better shot than a third-party or pure independent candidate. However, a notable personality needs to be tapped (I’m still hoping for Bloomberg), and the dust needs to settle on the D and R nomination races in such a way as to create enough of an opening in the middle to have a centrist/coalition candidate be viable, rather than just be a spoiler.
Goodness, this is going to be a long, but potentially extremely entertaining season for armchair political junkies like me. 
2 responses so far ↓
1 MikeM // 17 May 2007 at 12:45 pm
I stumbled upon your blog from Google while checking some information about Massachusetts auto insurance, and so I started reading some of these other articles. The Weekly Standard, which is as you probably know a rather right-wing publication, had a great article about the potential Bloomberg presidential candidacy. I only have the print format, but I’d suspect that the full article can be found on their website now that the issue is a couple of weeks old. It was mostly negative in tone and description, but laid his indellible (sp) popularity in being the primary motivation for his running.
In an aside, would Unity08 potentially field an independant candidate? If the P/VP are supposed to be from different parties, it would seem that having independant candidates may not bode well for the concept of bipartisanship.
Best wishes,
Mike
2 Jim // 17 May 2007 at 1:28 pm
How do you know Unity08 is “unabashedly centrist/moderate”? They don’t have a platform. In fact, they’re committed to not having a platform. What Unity08 is isn’t even “bipartisan,” since they have been mentioning that a Republican-Independent ticket would work for them, too. What IS Unity08????