NP: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones

I've been sort of slow on the uptake, but now that I think about it, yesterday's election in Israel was sort of the realization of my recurring centrist fantasy. For those of you new to this particular soapbox, I keep saying that we need a legitimate third party in American government. It ain't the Greens, it ain't the Reform Party, and it's certainly not the Libertarians. All of those are comprised of outsiders trying to shake things up pretty severely, and while there's a role for that sort of thing, it remains on the fringes.

No, we need some sort of significant shift in the partisan dynamic, and the only way I see it happening is via a transformation from within. That means that existing lawmakers have to defect to form a new party in the face of decreasing idenfication with their current allegiance. That's what Ariel Sharon did with Kadima. Likud was getting untenable for him, and the gap between Likud and Labour was growing larger and larger. Not unlike the gap between Republicans and Democrats here.

Of course, when the guy running the country makes the switch, it has a much more profound effect, but even on a smaller scale, it would be an important change. Given the current cognitive dissonance between the cultural and financial conservatives on the right, I like to think we'll see the GOP split into two at some point in the short- to medium-term future, giving us a similar landscape. As I said last week, this could manifest itself sooner rather than later in a Giuliani presidential run in 2008. He's probably one of few public figures that has Sharon's political stature and could subsequently pull it off.