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Glenn Greenwald: My guest today is the founder of DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas, and we're here to discuss a new project designed to do some research and test the viability of recruiting and finding credible progressive primary challengers for the 2010 cycle. Markos, thanks for joining me.

Markos Moulitsas: Pleasure. Thank you so much.

GG: Now, I wanted to begin by asking you, you've been writing in general over the last couple of months about the 'more and better Democrats' phrase, and have stressed that the 'more' part of that objective, namely "more Democrats," has been achieved, as a result of the Democratic majority now, and what will certainly be a much greater majority after the 2008 election, and the focus from now on will be on the 'better' part, meaning replacing bad Democratic incumbents with much better ones.

Why is it that you think that now is the time to do that, and what do you think the benefit of that is?

MM: Well, we started writing on races, when the sort of netroots arose, we're talking 2002, when we had fairly weak... we're bound in the Senate by what kind of seats, we were down in the House by 20-some seats, and so it was really difficult for us to talk about being picky about the kind of Democrat, when we were in the minority. So we focused in the last several cycles in building the number of Democrats in the House and in the Senate, and of course in the White House. And, now we're at the point, 2006, way ahead of schedule I think, thanks to Republican disastrous governance, we took our lead in the Senate, which is really a 49-49 deadlock with Joe Liebermann being sort of a hybrid, and obviously he doesn't count, and in the Senate [House] we took a, what is it, 34 seat majority, which is pretty impressive, but not so impressive that when you see that about 40 of those seats are held by Blue Dog Democrats, very conservative, and not just conservative in ideology, but the kind of people who really work to undermine the Democratic Party in order to score political points back home. People who work in concert with Republicans to stymie much of the Democratic agenda this past Congress.

So, we are right now on the verge, in 2008, of picking up maybe up to a dozen Senate seats, to take a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, even taking Joe Liebermann out of the equation; we may win 20 - 40 seats in the House which would put us into a 60 - 100 seat majority. These are crazy, ridiculous numbers. So, we have the sort of majority at this point where we can afford to be a little more choosy and picky about the kind of Democrat - there are so many, right now, in the House, and even some in the Senate, who have lost touch with the fact that they serve the people, that they're supposed to represent their constituents, and that they're not there for their own ego, for their own aggrandizement, or to serve corporate interests, who have seen the law, many of those people. So, what we wanted to do is, is we want to teach these people who is really their boss, and that's their local constituents, not the K Street lobbyists.

GG: Right, now, I want to ask you about a couple of objections that are typically made to the idea of launching primary challenges against Democratic incumbents in order to achieve these objectives. The first of which, is that, in a lot of these districts that you're talking about where you have Blue Dogs, the group that you mentioned, and other Democrats who have just been fairly awful, that these are conservative districts, and that only these types of Democrats, the kind of ones who serve the corporate donor base and who ignore the progressive base, that only those kind of Democrats can win, and that if you successfully mount aggressive challenges to them from the left, that what you're really going to do is ending up electing Republicans because you're going to be putting in Democrats against Republicans who can't win in those districts. What's your answer to that?

MM: You have a - obviously, every district is different; some of them are more conservative than others, and you have situations where, say in Alabama or Louisiana, where you cannot be a pro-choice Democrat and win. And it's just the reality of those districts. But, there is nowhere in the United States where voting for bankruptcy bill that benefits the credit card companies is going to cost you an election. It may cost you some lobbyists money, but it ain't going to cost you votes. There's nowhere in this country where voting for retroactive immunity for telecommunication companies is going to cost an election. It may cost you money from the AT&T and Verizon lobbyist, but it's not going to cost you votes. So, there's a difference between representing your district because of its conservative/liberal leanings, and then there are issues that really transcend partisanship or ideology and are really corporate issues. And this is where we, at least that's where I put a lot of my attention, is congressmen and senators who have lost touch with the fact that they represent their constituents, and are actually working to represent corporate interests that have absolutely nothing to do with the well-being of their district.

So, we're not going to go after representatives, congressmen, that are conservative just because they are quote "conservative." We're going to look at those districts, with representatives that elected officials that have lost touch with their constituents, and not providing their constituents service, are not voting in a way that helps the well-being and the welfare of the people who are in those districts. So, it's not a left versus right sort of thing; it's really more of a corporatist versus populist approach to governance. We think that elected officials should represent their constituents and not corporate interests.

GG: Yeah. I just want to follow up on that for a second, because one of the -- I wrote a piece, where I debated Ed Kilgore, maybe six or eight weeks ago, about whether Blue Dogs should be targeted for primary challenges and for defeat, and what was amazing was the amount of people who think that primary challenges and targeting people like that is some form of ideological purity. The argument was made that essentially it's repeating the mistakes that the Republican Party made in trying to expel and expunge anyone who is ideologically impure, and they turned themselves into this parochial minority party, by expelling anyone who didn't tow the ideological line.

How do you see this effort and your general view of primary challenges as being different from what the Republicans did: just basically implode and self-destruct?

MM: Look, DailyKos has raised a lot of money in past races for conservative Democrats like Stephanie Herseth Sandlin in South Dakota and Ben Chandler in Kentucky; so we're not afraid of Democrats who are more conservative than liberal allies. It's not - they're making it an ideological issue, no matter what we do or what we say - I think on ideological issues, because that's something that I think (unintelligible).

And also, the political people who are trying to discredit us can latch on to, right, they're trying to purge. There are plenty of so-called liberal Democrats, I think, in districts around the country, who have lost touch with who they represent. I don't think it really tells us, this liberal/conservative line - it's about representing the people in your district versus representing your corporate masters.

And I think that is why the Republicans lost at the end of the day. Yeah, there's been some ideological purity type stuff happening in their caucus, but the reason that they lost their majorities is because they became corrupt. Because they became really corrupted by the corporate money, that the Jack Abramoffs of the political world. That's why so many of them are going to jail; it's why so many of them have had to retire in disgrace. And that's what I want to avoid, because, you know what? The reason that the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994 was in large part because of the scandals of those, corruption, Dan Rostenkowski-type corruption. And it costs us dearly, it cost our nation dearly, because it brought in Newt Gingrich and it brought in this Republican Congress that had so much harm to our country, and I do not want the Democratic Congress become just as corrupt as a Gingrich Congress, as a DeLay Congress, and as Rostenkowski Congress did, because if we go down that path, all we're doing is we're opening up the doors for another Republican take-over, and we cannot afford that. We've seen what happens when that happens. So, I'm more interested in making sure that we have an accountable, clean, transparent majority, that's accountable to the people -- and doesn't forget that, then a Delay-style Congress where Republicans looked the other way because all that matters is power, and protecting the incumbent at all costs, and the heck with issues of clean government, transparent government, those things. I refuse to go down that path, and I want to make sure that our party is held accountable in the way that we want to hold Republicans accountable.

GG: Yeah, I think that's an important point, that a lot of times, everything gets looked at in terms of the ideological spectrum, and these conventional left-right categories, and the overwhelming perspective really is, to whom are these officials listening, and by whom are being held accountable? And I think you're absolutely right that it actually helps a party to continuously inject these demands that they be more accountable, so that you avoid that bloated corruption that the Democratic Party became in the 1990s.

Well, Markos, I think a lot of your explanations have been interesting and helpful, and I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me today.

MM: Thank you so much. Keep up the good work.

GG: You too, Markos, bye.

[Transcript courtesy of Thames Valley Transcribe]