Former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker is the target of a draft movement. Third-party entrant: Anyone? Walker?

It’s the dream that won’t die: a plain-spoken, pure-hearted independent sweeps into the presidential race, talks straight with the American people and upends a broken process with a historic third-party campaign.

Even at this late hour in the 2012 election, there’s still hope in elite circles that a fresh face will enter the field. Columnists continue to plead publicly for billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to run. Americans Elect, the group focused on obtaining ballot access for a so-far nameless independent candidate, begins to hold online caucuses this month to choose its nominee.


The organization suffered a setback this week when it announced that it was stalling the start of its nominating process because no candidate had yet qualified for the competition.

( Also on POLITICO: Results from October's POLITICO Primary search for an independent challenger)

With no high-profile national politician apparently interested, nonpartisan idealists are turning toward David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general and an advocate for broad fiscal reform. An austere technocrat, Walker has embraced the role of reluctant presidential contender and is the target of a draft movement seeking to place his name into nomination for the Americans Elect line.

“I’m not a candidate and I don’t expect to be a candidate. What I’ve said all along is, I have a strong preference not to run for public office,” Walker told POLITICO. “But I do believe it’s critically important that the general election campaign this year focus on the facts, the truth and the hard choices.”

Walker lacks the star power, name identification and, let’s face it, huge personal fortune that have made other third-party contenders relevant — from Bloomberg to Ross Perot, who took 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential race. Since independent candidates lack the party infrastructure other candidates have to support their campaigns, massive wealth or a flamboyant personality (think: Donald Trump) is typically an essential counterweight.

Walker has neither. What he — or another independent candidate — might have, is the sympathy of elites who cling to the view that the right common-sense leader could march into Washington and set the nation’s house in order.

“I think it’s a case of a lot of followers looking for a leader. It can be a daunting challenge to run as an independent or a third-party candidate, and so I’m not surprised that there haven’t been a lot of people stepping forward,” said Eliot Cutler, who nearly captured the Maine governor’s office in 2010 as an independent and has worked with Americans Elect.

In some respects, the 60-year-old Walker is a politician right off the third-party assembly line: The Connecticut resident talks about “tough choices” and is now touring the country speaking about the need for big fiscal reform. He’s been involved in the group No Labels — a confederation of centrist-leaning pols and operatives that promotes civility and cooperation — and has been an Americans Elect adviser.

If there’s a market for such a candidate outside the wonky sectors of the Acela corridor, Walker could be the guy.

To many students of independent politics, that’s an increasingly big “if.” The political environment seems as welcoming as ever for politicians challenging government, banks and other big institutions. Yet the absence of a war-horse candidate delivering that message on a presidential level has spurred some third-party advocates to ask whether they’ve been chasing a mirage all along.

“If you go back in American history, it’s very difficult to rally the majority of people behind an abstract idea — ‘We need a third party’ or ‘Government isn’t working.’ You need a candidate,” said former Maine Gov. Angus King, an independent currently favored to win his state’s open Senate seat. “Even Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t pull it off as a third-party candidate in 1912.”

The states, King suggested, could be more fertile ground for independents than the presidential battlefield: “It’s hard to translate from Rhode Island or Maine or Connecticut to the national stage.”

Elliot Ackerman, the chief operating officer of Americans Elect, said it was “still a little bit premature” to be talking about the absence of a heavy hitter on the group’s ballot line. Officials with the group said it is still in conversation with additional candidates, though they declined to share names.

And regardless of who gets nominated, Ackerman argued that the group succeeded in its goal of “opening up a closed political system.”

“What we’re doing is basically building a platform so this conversation can even be had,” he said.

But to some, all the elite swooning over the search for a third-party savior has started to look more than a little futile — though they haven’t given into despair yet.

“The cheerleading is great, it’s important, it’s terrific,” Cutler said, referring to the media’s infatuation with the idea of a third-party campaign appealing to the political middle. “Every time Tom Friedman, David Brooks writes a piece — that’s great. But that doesn’t by itself make things happen.”

Beyond the usual limitations of what a newspaper columnist can achieve, there’s also the matter of whether upscale politicos have misread the demand for a third party all along.

Doug Usher, who manages the Purple Poll — a survey focused on independents for the bipartisan consulting firm Purple Strategies — had a more pointed explanation: Elites have largely misread polls showing the public wants to see “things getting done” as demand for a third party.

Voters may be intrigued by options beyond the Democratic and Republican ranks, Usher explained, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re yearning for a centrist alternative — or that partisan divisions don’t reflect real, difficult issue debates that elude supposedly “common-sense” solutions.

“You have people that have, usually, a political agenda, with this idea that everybody’s got it wrong and if we could just think about it in a different way, we could solve all our problems,” Usher said. “I think that really diminishes the intelligence of, A, the American people who have voted the way they have, and B, of people who have been serving in Washington for many years and are dealing with structural issues.”

Ironically, despite the near-certain failure of third-party politics on the presidential level, anti-partisan (or perhaps post-partisan) candidates have made headway in recent years lower down the ballot. Cutler’s 2010 campaign for governor was a prime example, coming only about 10,000 votes short of victory. He says he may run again in 2014.

Rhode Island, meanwhile, elected former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee as an independent governor in 2010, and King is the heavy front-runner to succeed moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.

What’s more, whether or not Walker ends up as the Americans Elect nominee, there will be other third-party options this year: Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is likely to be nominated by the Libertarian Party while former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer is seeking the nomination of both Americans Elect and the Reform Party.

The fact that forces are churning outside the traditional two-party system, however, is likely more a symptom of the country’s overall political turmoil rather than a sign that anyone’s on track to shake up the political universe as a 2012 presidential candidate.

That’s a reality that even fans of the independent presidential candidates appear to recognize. Where they might have talked a year ago about electing Bloomberg president, many now cite “changing the debate” from outside the party system — the conventional, quixotic goal of the third-party campaign.

Nick Troiano, who heads the Draft Walker group, said he’d consider it a win if Walker were able to generate “a more honest and substantive debate” in the 2012 campaign — ideally by getting on the debate stage this fall with President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

“I do think [Walker] can draw the support necessary in the polls to get into the debates, and I think that’s a game changer,” said Troiano, who was also involved in the group Unity08, a 2008 forerunner to Americans Elect. “I’m not going to foreclose the possibility of Walker being elected — who knows what could happen?”

Though Troiano acknowledged Walker would have a long way to go as a candidate, he added: “What [Walker] lacks in broader name recognition, he makes up for by being really well-known and really well-respected by the media, I think, and both parties.”