George Will speculates about the possibility of an independent Ron Paul bid:

Well, his candidacy might guarantee Barack Obama’s reelection, and this might hurt the career of his son Rand, the freshman senator from Kentucky. Other than that, however, Ron Paul may think what his ideology implies — that Obama is only marginally more mistaken than Paul’s Republican rivals, who do not wake up each day angry about the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

I am fairly confident that there will be no independent challenger coming from the right in this election, and even if there is one I am very confident that it won’t be Ron Paul. Rep. Paul has given every indication that his goal is to have the best showing possible in the Republican nominating contest, and there’s no reason to think otherwise. Besides, there will probably be no significant independent or third-party challenger of any kind in 2012. As much as the public distrusts the leaders of both parties, partisans reliably regard the victory of the other party’s coalition as so unacceptable that it has to be prevented, and dissenters within both parties tend to be more ideological voters than everyone else, which makes it unlikely that they are going to back a protest candidacy in large numbers. The Greens and Libertarians will receive their usual levels of support, or maybe they will get a little less support than usual as they did in 2008. Other than that, 2012 is most likely going to be another bland major party contest in which the genuinely minimal differences between the nominees on a host of major issues will be artificially exaggerated to mobilize voters on both sides.

There ought to have been a major third-party candidacy in 2008. McCain’s nomination and the enormous unpopularity of the GOP should have created the conditions for a major third-party showing for a conservative or libertarian candidate, but that isn’t what happened. If conservatives were not motivated enough to rebel against the GOP in 2008 at the tail end of one of the most disastrous Republican administrations of the last eighty years, they are hardly going to start casting protest votes in large numbers when there is an opportunity to defeat a Democratic incumbent. Besides, why would dissident conservatives want to give the GOP an easy way out to excuse their failures? If the Republican nominee fails to take advantage of Obama’s vulnerabilities as an incumbent in poor economic times, the blame should be squarely placed on that nominee, his agenda, and the policies favored by the party’s elites.