http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021202&s=dugger (excerpts below)
"We, the Nader people, certainly put Bush close enough electorally for the Supreme Court to seize the presidency for him. Gore "lost" because of many factors--including his own empty campaign--but the fact that an event has a multiplicity of causes does not dissolve any of those causes or absolve any group of players of their responsibility. National exit-poll data published the day after the election suggested that Nader's candidacy cost Gore about three-quarters of a million votes, but even exit polls that Nader himself cites indicate that arguably we Nader voters made it possible for Bush to win New Hampshire's four electoral votes (remember, Bush "won" by just four) and clearly converted a Gore victory in Florida, with its decisive twenty-five electoral votes, into the mesmerizing seesaw that the Supreme Court stopped when Bush was allegedly up on Gore by 537 votes. It is very clear--who can persuasively deny it?--that the more votes Nader gets in 2004, the likelier it is that Nader and his supporters will elect Bush.
...To beat Bush, the question we must decide now is not what candidate to run but what vehicle we can use to win the presidency in 2004. It cannot be the Green Party. "You know you can't win as a Green in 2004," I said to Ralph. The lamentable truth, but the truth, is that the only vehicle with which the voters can beat Bush for President is the Democratic Party. There is no other. Therefore, I argued, what is needed is an undertaking by the liberals, progressives and populists of the country to challenge the corporation-corrupted leaders of the Democratic Party and their Democratic Leadership Council, to make the party's sellout course since 1978 itself the issue of the Democratic primaries, and to converge behind the nomination of a progressive Democratic candidate for President--be it Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Dennis Kucinich, Russell Feingold, Jan Schakowsky or Jesse Jackson Jr. The point, I said, is to get a strong progressive candidate and to get our forces behind that candidate and a progressive platform. Among many other things, it should include a commitment to have the party fight for instant-runoff voting (IRV), which at one stroke would end the third-party "spoiler" threat to the major parties and would free citizens to vote for their favorite candidates without helping to elect candidates whose views are diametrically opposed to theirs.
...But there is more difference between the Republicans and the Democrats than Nader concedes. The majority of House Democrats and almost half the Democratic senators rejected Bush's request for blank-check authority to wage war against Iraq. Democrats in the Senate have blocked judicial nominees who would make the federal courts dramatically more right-wing. And Democrats in the House and Senate remain significantly better than Republicans on the major domestic issues and significantly more committed to protecting civil rights, civil liberties and abortion rights. That, along with fear of electing Republicans by voting third-party--not ignorance of the issues, as some of my less thoughtful Green friends suggest--is why overwhelming majorities of black and Latino voters, and significant majorities of women, continue to vote Democratic.