OH, NO -- THEY WOULDN'T...
(updated)

When Olympia Snowe announced her resignation from the Senate, Dave Weigel tweeted:

Bayh/Snowe 2012? #americanselect

Other people imagined a Snowe/Huntsman ticket. And in the comments to my last post, Jack wrote about Snowe:

Maybe she wants to be the Americans Elect candidate. Her excuse for quitting is identical to their excuse for existing.

Could that possibly be her plan? And could it be the GOP's plan?

Maybe this is a cockamamie theory, but what if the GOP thinks the way to salvage the Romney candidacy is to persuade a Republican who'd get mostly Democratic votes to pursue the Americans Elect nomination? What if the Republicans made it worth Snowe's while to do this? And wouldn't Romney (or at least the old Romney) be her kind of guy?

Remember that Obama does much better among women than among men. A Snowe candidacy might really go right at that advantage.

Am I crazy to speculate about this?

****

UPDATE: Haters gonna hate (see the comments), but they should hate Jonathan Chait as well, because he's speculating the same way about Snowe's retirement statement:

This sounds exactly like the kind of rhetoric emanating from Americans Elect ...

I suspect it may not be coincidental that David Boren, the former Democratic senator from Oklahoma and oil industry lickspittle, came out for Americans Elect today. The group is set up so that its presidential and vice-presidential candidates need to come from opposing parties....

Snowe and Boren would make for the kind of ticket Americans Elect is looking for. Is that the plan?