What Would a Third Party President Accomplish?

Isabel Sawhill advances the dream of DC pundits everywhere, a centrist third party president:

With this as background, I am waiting for a leader who is able to articulate the need for more sensible and pragmatic solutions. Such a leader would start a movement of like-minded citizens that eventually culminates in a third party win of the presidency. I realize that the history of successful third parties is not encouraging, but the most potent political force in this country right now is a public that is completely disillusioned and angry about the way Washington works and less extreme in its view than its representatives in Congress. Thus, the times are ripe for greater success than in the past. To make this work, I think we would need to adopt the kind of alternative voting plan (recently touted by Tom Friedman in the New York Times) that would insure people that if they voted for a third party candidate it wouldn’t hurt the chances of their second choice in the process.

This seems awfully far-fetched. For one thing, allocation of electoral votes is a state-by-state matter, so even if Democrats and Republicans were more open than they really are to electoral reforms that would disempower them, going state-by-state to change the rules would be mighty time-consuming. And then your third party white knight rides into the White House. And what does this achieve? Instead of one opposition party in congress looking to deny the president victories, you’d have two! I feel like it would be a mess of gridlock, which is a situation that can easily enough be brought about within the confines of the current system by putting John Boehner in the Speaker’s chair.