Obama as a Third Party Candidate?

With the unyielding machine that is the Hillary4Prez campaign bearing down, hard to believe that Barack, despite a stong showing in Iowa and South Carolina, will win his party's nomination for President.

This leaves him with several options.
1) He begrudgingly accepts the defeat and throws support behind Hillary. possible.
2) He does the above, and simply awaits his next "chance" in 2012 (being that Hillary will probably lose handily to the GOP candidate...more on that later).

3) He refuses to let the Dem nomination loss end his run for 2008, and runs as a third-party candidate.

This last possibility has crossed his mind, Im sure. In his drive for "change", and in recent ads, he has reiterated the point that Hillary will change nothing. Real change will only come, as he hinted in his "homage" to Reagan, with a fundamentally different candidate with a fundamentally different vision with different goals and a different way of achieving them.

This vision has garnished support from Democrats, Independents, and even disgruntled Republicans angered with the trainwreck that has been the 2nd term of Prez BushII.

So what happens if he takes his mission down the third party option?

Barack has a massive warchest and a large part of the electorate backing just his run for party nomination. Give him at least 75% of his existing supporters, coupled with excellent debate performances and advertising, and he can have a run as a third rail vote far exceding anything we have seen for the last 80 years.

Going back to the days of Teddy Roosevelt, in fact, who was so disgruntled with the Taft Presidency, he ran as a Bull Moose candidate in 1912, losing to Wilson but vastly outperforming the then-powerful Republican Party he had been a loyal part of for the previous 30 years.

Obama running in the race will assure, of course, a Republican victory in November: his message appeals more to the center and center-left than to the Republicans, who will fall back on the GOP choice, giving him at least 39% of the popular vote in most states.
The remaining votes will be divided, unevenly, between Hillary and Obama.
Obama could pull an upset and carry states like Minnesota, Oregon, New Hamphsire, Vermont, and even possibly his home state of Illinois, losing vastly to a 340+ Electoral Vote majority the Republican will subsequently achieved thanks to the split dem vote, but performing well without alliance to a major party.

A republican wins the 2008 Presidential election.

Obama, refusing to sit back, continues to build his political coalition, cruises to reelection in the Senate, and begins attacking the then-elect Republican incumbant.
Given the shaky status of our current economy, its hard to say how well the GOP incumbent would do against Obama, who, this time, wins his party nomination AND heads into the election with a huge portion of independent voters.

Throwing in the towel in 2008, if we project Hillary winning in November, means Obama must delay his "revolution" by another eight years.

Fighting now assures him his Presidency in four more.

Few Presidents who brought about the level of change Obama keeps harping succeeded in doing so the first time they entered the ring.
Ronald Reagan waited 16 years, two terms as Californias governor, and a crushing loss to Ford in the 1976 primary between the time of his "A Time for Choosing" speech and his inaugural adress in January 1981. He ran against the then-current Republican leadership in 1976, and lost narrowly to the status quo.

Losing in the spring to Hillary Clinton could mean an acceleration of Obamas ultimate Presidential aspirations.