a sensible economic policy, a sensible foreign policy, a sensible approach to social issues like health and education and housing.
everyone wants these things; to suggest that those of us on the left (or indeed on the right, although I think that the solutions that they propose are totally wrong), the whole point of politics is that we disagree what exactly a "sensible economic policy" means. To say that its only boring centrists that have "a sensible economic policy" is quite frankly rather insulting; especially when the default centrist position always seems to be "lets not rock the boat and keep things as they are!!!!".
Besides any significant third party of the middle won't rise under America's system; since it'd need to get more than 40% in a particular state or district to get representation; and if it couldn't do that then it'd find its vote getting squeezed in every marginal election due to the whole spoiler effect thing. If America moved towards better ways of electing their politicians (PR for the House and maybe also the Senate as well, national popular vote using AV for the Presidency) then you might see a centre party emerge but it'd be along with other smaller groups on the left and the right, and honestly who knows whether it'd actually manage to stay popular; liberal parties in Europe (who are almost exclusively parties of the centre) have had huge amounts of trouble in recent years losing lots of votes - look at the Lib Dems in the UK or the FDP in Germany (who probably aren't really a party of the centre, but they're seen as such) along with more parties of the populist left and right getting representation. Why should it be assumed that there are this huge amount of "centrists" who'd back that sort of party in America?
I suppose its just that a centrist position is one most people can get on board with, there's a bell curve for every policy. Any extremist position by definition is one that a majority will have a problem with. Secondly, it rather depends on how you perceive democracy, whether the point of it is compromise and coming up with a position that most people from all walks of life can support, or whether it is about winning, getting 50%+1 votes and be able to force your point of view on the others. Centrism makes sense but most of us love the idea of winning.
and yes of course, any third party in the middle will have trouble defining itself, but right now I think its far more fertile territory for a third party than the Greens or Libertarians are finding.
