All for them but doubt their viability. Even at the Congressional level, true “something elses” (as opposed to, say, Connecticut for Joe Lieberman partiers) are vanishingly rare, and if there were a real third-party groundswell, you’d expect to see real evidence of it. Yes, Perot got ~18% of the popular vote with no national apparatus and none of this “prior evidence” I’m calling for, but he still managed a grand total of zero in the Electoral College. The game is rigged towards the bigs (and they like it that way).
Certainly such an outsider candidate is not going to win the Oval Office in 2012 unless there is an epic upheaval between now and then. Even that person would have to be on the scene by now in order to benefit from said upheval. Though I don’t doubt Palin may run as a Tea Klanner before she ever runs as a GOP nominee (and no, I don’t think she will ever have the GOP nomination), I see her as a cosmically unlikely third-party winner of the Presidency.
But I honestly don’t think Obama is for extrajudicial targeted killings. The larger security apparatus is for them, and taking on that system is essentially suicide. Even pairing back small parts of it that everyone could agree are redundant or outdated in some way is probably politically impossible in this environment. The sad truth is that zero effort has been expended in building the national conversation towards some future reassessment (maybe even a Blue Ribbon commission!) of this idiotic state of affairs in which we have a security state no one understands and certainly no one (in power, anyway) wants to questions much. The Washington Post, of all institutions, did at least make a pass at moving discussion in that direction, and it largely fell on deaf ears. And that is the true sound of our Republic dying.
Lemkin 