>Ronnie Dugger, who presented Nader to the 1996 and 2000 Green conventions,
>has rejected any Nader run in 2004 and agrees that it is absurb for Greens
>to continue to deny their role in putting Bush in office. He states the
>case for Greens reuniting with other progressives in a primary fight in the
>2004 Democratic Presidential primary:
>
>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.
-- Marta Russell Los Angeles, CA http://www.disweb.org