On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman repeated his call for Michael Bloomberg to run for president. Friedman has finally given up on the fantasy that America's "radical center" might coalesce around a moderate third-party candidate, but in his latest column, he argued that even if Bloomberg can't win, he could still make a difference:

I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate -- like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg -- who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America's global leadership before we implode.

To avoid imminent implosion, Friedman recommended "fiscal, tax and entitlement reform," which proves that the radical center has some really groundbreaking policy ideas. Unfortunately, he didn't offer many details. His chief concern seemed to be that his cell phone kept dropping calls during his too-slow train ride to Washington. While many people would be happy for a President Bloomberg to speed up the NYC-DC connection and add a few cell towers, it doesn't seem like much of a campaign platform.

Friedman's plea for centrism follows on the heels of his colleague Bill Keller's clarion call for the two major party candidates to move to the center, to which our own Dan Kervick snorted, "They are already in the center.  What does he want them to do, start fondling each other?" In that case, Bloomberg would be forced to snuggle between their passionate embrace.

Whether or not one agrees with Dan that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are ideological bedmates, you'd have to be a New York Times columnist not to see that these two would happily share a newlywed suite if they could get away with it.

Has Friedman forgotten the way Barack "Post-Partisan" Obama chased after John Boehner with a bouquet of roses wrapped in a budget plan? Does he really think that Mitt "Mr. Fix-It" Romney would flee his bipartisan accomplishments in Massachusetts if his pollsters told him that his constituents were enthusiastic about his love-fest with Ted Kennedy.

There is only one reason that the Obama and Romney are not joining hands and singing, "I've been working on the railroad," as they lay tracks for high-speed trains across the continent: The voters don't want 'em to. Americans may whine about partisanship and dutifully tell pollsters that they just want everyone to get along, but when election time arrives, they keep voting for the wingnuts, particularly on the right.

Can Friedman really have forgotten that Obama explicitly campaigned on rebuilding American infrastructure and that the crown jewel of this initiative was none other than a high-speed train network. Moreover, he actually managed to pass some minor legislation to kick it off. For these efforts, the voters rewarded him in the mid-term elections by electing a slate of Republican governors who promptly canceled all those rail projects in their respective states. We're not talking about crazy right-wing strongholds likes Mississippi or Oklahoma. This happened in the swing states of Florida and Wisconsin and the blue-state of New Jersey, which killed a much-needed rail tunnel to Bloomberg-land.

So forget about Bloomberg for president or post-partisan Obama or Romney the closet-moderate. America is deeply, bitterly, stubbornly divided. And unless someone fixes that problem, we're not going to see those high-speed trains anytime soon, and we're certainly not going to get any of that "fiscal, tax, and entitlement reform" Friedman says we need.

Sometimes I think the only thing that can put us on the right track is a nice big implosion.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual