She said she was committed to the race in part because she was sick of the male-dominated Democratic Party in the state.

“It’s very much an old boys club in Indiana and I’m out to break it,” she said.

Before hanging up she added that she wanted to offer a “reminder:” “Indiana is 52 percent women.”

D’Ippolito also suggested that Bayh’s announcement was timed so that the state’s top Democratic officials could hand-pick his successor.

“I don’t know if they’re smoking cigars there, but the decision has already been made,” she said.

Democrats I talk to think D’Ippolito’s only path to the ballot would be a quasi-dirty trick by Republicans to help her out, the sort of thing some operatives pulled in 2006 in an unsuccessful bid to get Carl Romanelli on the Pennsylvania ballot as a Green candidate for U.S. Senate — before that, the efforts by some operatives to help Ralph Nader get on presidential ballots.

But this isn’t a candidate who can deploy a political machine or war room to get the job done.

In 2004, when Democrats — rather understandably — were trying to make it hard for Nader to make it onto state ballots, the candidate got unexpected help from Citizens for a Sound Economy — the group that would later split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. In Oregon, one of the states where Nader voters nearly helped throw the election to Bush in 2000, CSE enlisted its volunteers to collect signatures for Nader.

“We saw it as an obvious opportunity to split the liberal base in a swing state,” Matt Kibbe, CSE’s president and CEO told ABC News.

Kibbe said the effort to bolster Nader’s popularity is also part of a plan to force Kerry to compete for liberal votes, thus complicating any efforts to appear more moderate.

Kibbe is now the president of FreedomWorks. Way back in 2004, Howard Dean actually debated Nader about his decision to take this kind of help from conservative activists. It’s an interesting footnote now — probably more interesting than Nader’s predictable backseat whining and scolding.

“Terry McAuliffe is slipperier than an eel in olive oil,” Nader said in an interview.

He said McAuliffe, who was the Democratic National Committee chairman at the time, had offered Nader’s campaign an unspecified amount of money, believed to be party funds, to spend in 31 states in exchange for an agreement to withdraw from 19 battleground states where he could potentially hurt Democrat John Kerry.

Perhaps more shockingly, McAuliffe’s not denying it. He’s not exactly admitting it, either — but he’s certainly not calling Nader a liar.

In fact, McAuliffe aides are even attempting to spin this in his favor, basically saying that any effort he made to thwart Nader and prevent the re-election of George W. Bush might actually play well with party loyalists.

In a statement to The Post, spokeswoman Liz Smith said McAuliffe “was concerned that Ralph Nader would cost John Kerry the election as he did Al Gore in 2000 and give us another four years of George W. Bush.” She then jabbed Nader, saying it appears he “misses seeing his name in the press.”

The problem is, Ralph Nader doesn’t need to find a new project to make him relevant these days — with corporate bailouts and credit card reform dominating the public psyche right now, a man who built his reputation on consumer advocacy should be as happy as a pig in mud. And he is busy critiquing everything from the government-led restructuring of General Motors to the handling of swine flu.

The Daily Beast points out that Nader was willing to take cash from wealthy Republicans trying to siphon votes from Democrats in that same election. He told The Post, however, that he turned down McAuliffe’s offer.

So why talk now, five years after the fact? The disclosure of the alleged bribe — which comes less than two weeks before Virginia’s June 9 Democratic gubernatorial primary — will apparently be played up in an upcoming book written by a former Nader campaign manager. Today’s news will likely drive up interest in that project, which is scheduled for release the week after the primary.