Will boosting third parties become a Republicrat strategy?

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum seems very intent on helping out the Green Party candidate, Carl Romanelli, in the three-way race this November. He paid petitioners to collect signatures to meet Pennsylvania's absurdly high ballot access requirement of 67,070 signatures. Now he's going to debate Romanelli, presumably to lend him more credibility. All this is a blatant attempt to take votes away from Santorum's Democratic opponent so that he can maintain his seat in the Senate. If it works, however, helping third-party candidates could become a real strategy for the Republicrats - Democrats helping Libertarians and Republicans helping Greens. This could catalyze a move towards a four-sided political spectrum that looks more like the Nolan Chart than our current artificial two-party system.

I'm all for this, and if it's to happen, I hope that the Democrats actually gain significant control this November and then make little orno progress with it, so that they'll be in the same position that Republicans are now, meaning that both Republicans and Democrats will be funding third-party candidates. I also hope that strategy backfires on them, for obvious reasons.

I'm not too worried about them realizing that it could - they've never passed up short-term gains for long-term rationality before.

Digg it.