It will come as a great shock to you all that no one cares about Americans Elect (via Weigel):

Last week was supposed to be the first week of online voting on the Americans Elect site, when anyone anywhere could click to endorse practiced politicians or to draft neophytes. But the candidate choices have remained decidedly low-profile, and traffic is meager on the site, which cost $9 million to construct. Scrambling to avert failure, Americans Elect has postponed online voting for a month.

What I find most offensive about efforts such as Americans Elect and its forerunner Unity ’08 is the conceit that “centrists” have too little clout and influence in shaping legislation and policy. This is the same objection so many people have to Friedman’s cult of Bloomberg: the entire thing is an exercise in pretending that the people and ideas that actually dominate much of the political landscape are marginalized and cut off from power. “Centrists” already wield power out of all proportion to their numbers, and they seem to be most frustrated they cannot completely ignore what the core constituencies in their respective parties want.

There is a powerful case to be made that a two-party system that operates within the very narrow confines of bipartisan consensus on many major policies is harmful to the country. Americans Elect isn’t making that case or anything like it. What the Americans Elect project represents is an effort to produce the distilled essence of everything that is wrong with the current two-party system and then pretend that it is an exciting, new alternative.