It’s hard to make centrism sexy.
In case you haven’t already seen the news, Unity ‘08 is scaling significantly back. From a letter sent to their mailing list:
At the current moment, we don’t have enough members or enough money to take the next step toward achieving ballot access in 50 states, reaching the goal of establishing our online convention, and nominating a Unity ticket for president and vice president this coming fall.
The past year has taught us that it’s tough to rally millions for a process without a candidate or an issue. In the past, third party movements that have broken through the monopoly of the established parties have always been based on a person (Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 or Ross Perot in the last decade) or a burning issue (slavery in the case of the insurgent Republican party in 1860). Motivating people to fix a broken system that drives candidates to the extremes by creating something more inclusive and sensible has proven to be a lot harder than we expected.[...]
And so reluctantly, especially given the volatility of the present situation, we’re forced to scale back, but not cease our operations, and suspend our ballot access project. Our website will become less interactive (it takes staff to answer hundreds of e-mails a day) and we can’t in good faith make the $5 million commitment necessary to make a serious start on ballot access.
But we’re not closing our doors. We believe it is important to see our case against the FEC through (both for Unity08 and any similar movement in the future) and be ready to gear up if (when) we win our case and political circumstances warrant later this spring. Unity is in the air right now, and Mayor Bloomberg seems poised to run on his own campaign (and the fact is that two independent candidacies wouldn’t work) if the parties leave the sensible center open. But all this could change in a matter of weeks.
Ah, well. It was a nice idea. However, sadly, it seems that Americans are hardwired into thinking that we can only have two major parties, plus assorted nuts outside that norm handed down from on high (or at least from Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln).