Eventually the “circular firing squad” that is the Republican primary will be over and the last man standing will be the party’s nominee for president.

If that candidate is Rick Santorum, I think there is a good chance a Third Party will try to fill the space between the really “severely conservative” Santorum (or even Mitt Romney) and the left-of-center Barack Obama.

It would be fitting. After all, this is the 20th anniversary of Ross Perot’s independent candidacy. Perot won close to 20 percent of the vote, and his success was instrumental in making deficit reduction one of Bill Clinton’s top priorities.

An independent candidate in 2012 who is a little more, shall we say, “normal” than Perot could have an equally big impact on the winner.

I still don’t know if I’d support an independent. Like others, I worry about electing the wrong person by accident. (See: Ralph Nader and George W. Bush.) But I know what I’d pay good money to see: an intelligent independent candidate just taking part in the presidential debates because it would make both Obama and his Republican opponent better. One independent I’d like to see play that role is David Walker.

Walker was the country’s chief auditor, serving from 1998 to 2008 as the U.S. comptroller general.

He is currently the chief executive of the Comeback America Initiative (www.tcaii.org), a nonpartisan group dedicated to getting America’s fiscal house in order. Walker – who came in second to Hillary Clinton in a reader poll that Politico conducted last October for favorite Third Party candidate – told me that he has no desire to run but that he’s been speaking across the country, trying to do what Perot did.

“He did three things,” Walker said. “He woke up the American people to the truth about our fiscal situation in clear, concise and compelling terms.

“He made the presidential debates much more substantive, and he helped to set the next president’s agenda, and, as a result, we made great progress in reducing the deficit from 1993 to 2000. Now we have lost all of that and more.”

Walker’s view is simple: “We are not Greece, where the government grew too big, promised too much and waited too long to restructure, but we’re making many of the same mistakes.”

The American people are “starved for three things,” Walker said: “truth, leadership and solutions.” Unfortunately, the two parties are just offering “laggardship – waiting for something to hit the fan” so they can again just react “without adequate due diligence.”

After months of nutty, gravity-free Republican primary debates, how great would it be to have presidential debates in which a smart independent like Walker was in the middle to challenge both sides and offer sensible solutions?

Thomas Friedman