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MORUS: So I’m sat here with Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos blog – one of the world’s largest blogs,

KOS (interrupting): You can never make those kind of claims, you know – there’s always someone out there … but it’s pretty big!

MORUS: well certainly one of the more influential blogs in US politics, and now you’ve got a book coming out too. Would you like to say a couple of words about that to kick off?

KOS: It’s called ‘Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era’ a sort of update, or sequel to, or inspired by ‘Rules for Radicals’ by a guy named Saul Alinsky who was a street organiser in the 50s, 60s and 70s. It was written in 1971, the year I was born actually, and I reread it recently and was like ‘This is a really kick-ass book’ if a little dated - its 30 years old – so I wanted to teach how to be an activist in a digital era.

MORUS: It seems to me, and I think that’s evidenced by the 500 or so bloggers here, that the US blogosphere is very much left-leaning. Will that survive the Democrats perhaps taking back the White House as well as both Houses of Congress? Is the blogosphere necessarily an insurgency medium?

KOS: Yeah, I think we’re at our best when we’re insurgents. And we’ve shown, even with Barack Obama, that when we disagree with something he’s doing, we’re not going to sit there and keep our mouths shut we’re going to let him know. I think it’ll be a healthy relationship - we know where he stands, and most of the time I suspect we’ll agree, and when we don’t agree, we’ll discuss it, you know? I think there a feeling, at least in American politics – I don’t presume to speak for Britain or for anywhere else - there’s still this notion that conflict is bad - ‘Ooh, they disagree, there’s conflict’ - but it’s not bad. We’re a family. We’re going to have disagreements on how things stand, and I think its healthier to air those disagreements and let him know where we stand, rather than do what the Republicans did with George Bush, where they kept their mouths shut for eight years while he destroyed this country and the world, and nobody did anything about it because ‘Oh, he’s George Bush, we’ve got to stick with him or the terrorists have won’.

MORUS: With, you think, some quite serious consequences for them in November?

KOS: Absolutely. We’re going to remain insurgents. I have absolutely no interest in being… I live as far as possible from Washington DC as is absolutely humanly possible. I don’t want to be invited to their cocktail parties. It’s a whole different world – I think it’s a corrupting world, and I really, truly think that we are at our best when we’re playing the role of insurgents.

MORUS: You did a little bit of work, didn’t you, with the Guardian newspaper in the last UK election cycle? The UK blogosphere is really dominated by right-wing blogs, largely I suppose because the Conservatives are in Opposition. Would you consider trying to start a similar progressive blogosphere movement overseas?

KOS: It’s got to come from the bottom-up, it’s got to be home-grown. I don’t know what the dynamics would look like or what it would take. I just did Daily Kos, and it captured a market need for what it was offering, which is why it’s grown in the way it has. But it wasn’t planned – there’s no way I could have written a business plan, and shopped it around to donors and said “This is what we’re going to do”. I just think it has to be done, and that the right voices will emerge, and not only that the right voices will emerge but to have people who know the technology, and mould the technology in a way that encourages community. That’s been one of my strengths.

MORUS: You were a serving military man, is that right?

KOS: I was army. Artillery

MORUS: Looking to the service histories of the candidates in this election. The comparisons that have been drawn with the West Wing are stark, where a fresh new minority candidate faces a maverick Republican Senator from the South West. The key difference is that whilst the Matt Santos character was a Marine, in this election it is the Republican John McCain who is a veteran and former Prisoner of War, whereas Barack Obama hasn’t served. Do you think that in any way, that makes him a weaker candidate?

KOS: Well, you know, John Kerry was a war hero, and it didn’t help him any. George Bush obviously was the opposite of whatever war hero is – a rich coward asshole, I think. At the end of the day it’s part of the biography, but I don’t think that people in this country really vote on who has the best military service. If that were true, we would have won a lot more recent elections than we have done. So it’s a factor - it’s a part of the biography, but I think Obama has a compelling story of his own. It could be more compelling, a little bit better, if he had military service in his background, but he is who he is because of the experiences he has had, he’s gotten where he is today because of those experiences, and at the end of the day that’s what people are going to be voting for, not whether he served in the army or not.

MORUS: Without overstating the case, because you’ve criticised almost every Democratic politician at some point or another, but you’ve had some pretty harsh things to say about Joe Biden over the years: his links to the Banking Industry, or certain statements he made when he was conducting his campaign for the Presidency. Are you happy with the choice Obama has made?

KOS: Well he would not have been my first choice. I would have preferred someone from outside of DC – I’m very anti-DC, you know? I really honestly believe that the place is corrosive. And some people are better than most…

MORUS (interrupting): Joe Biden does commute home every evening!

KOS (laughing): Yeah, all the way to what? Delaware?! Right! It is something, but that’s not actually going to help him. It is clear that the campaign felt they needed someone to mollify the Villagers – the Washington DC establishment – not just the Democratic Party establishment, but the Media. I mean David Broder, who’s like the voice of the Establishment, wrote like a love-letter to Biden today. That’s what they were going for. You see Obama is essentially an outsider – he shows up, and four years later he’s the nominee – and there’s a pecking order, there’s a hierarchy, and he upended it. And a lot of people were a little bit like “who the hell do you think you are?” and so by bringing Biden on-board (because everybody loves Biden in DC, he is a favourite in that world) … but, of course, he’s too old to run for President in eight years, so there’s no little power centres.

MORUS: Does he maybe get dropped in four years?

KOS: No, no, no - this is what you want, because there are all the power centres grow around people who are going to be running for President in eight years. (This of course is if Obama wins and gets re-elected, which I’m assuming!). If Obama picks somebody who’s young enough to run for President, then t going to work as hard [on the re-election campaign] they’re not going to kill themselves, or do anything to give this guy a fair advantage.

MORUS: So he wants a Vice President, but not a Presidential candidate?

KOS: Like Cheney has been, you know? He’s like “I ain’t going to run for President”, so everyone can rally around the nominee, knowing that he was not going to be a bottleneck…
The upshot of that was that there were so many candidates who ran, but…these guys all want to be President, I don’t get it!

But of that crowd, that DC crowd, Biden’s one of the best and one of the things that I can’t wait to see happen is that the guy can throw an insult like nobody else. One thing about the bloggers, not all bloggers but the subset of us who are partisan, is that we like Democrats who know how to throw an insult at Republicans, and with Biden I think we’re going to get that quite a bit.

MORUS: Biden is best known for his work on the Senate Committees for Foreign Relations and the Judiciary. Is there a danger that success in the campaign will not be about the answer the candidates give the electorate, but about the questions that are asked? Do the Democrats really want to fight this election on Foreign Affairs and Judicial appointments - issues that have favoured the Republicans previously, or are known for lighting up the GOP base?

KOS: Well right now, foreign policy is a minefield for Republicans, I mean Iraq is absolutely a disaster for them. People have no appetite for it – and you’ve got John McCain talking about a draft. These are the things that the American people really don’t want to talk about right now. I would actually be more comfortable if this election was being waged on national security – it’s pivoted to the economy, which, you know, is fine for us too – unfortunately, things right now are absolutely shit in the country, and the Republicans can be blamed for it all. But choosing Biden though is not going to determine the agenda. At the end of the day, we have a message, and they are going to elect (or reject) Obama. That’s the bottom line, where we’re at right now. Vice Presidents don’t have a meaningful impact in terms of geography, or things like that. They don’t plug holes in certain demographics. I mean you can say “He’s from Scranton, PA, he’s a working class white guy - therefore Obama is going to get the working class, white…”. It doesn’t work that way! People will still vote on Barack Obama.

What Biden does though, is that he is surrogate number one, so he gets to go on TV and brook the base and throw insults. And one thing that Republicans … I mean you go back to 2004, the Republicans … the Democratic Convention was all about these lofty ideals, and nothing about George Bush, right, nothing about George Bush. The Republican Convention, they’re waving purple band aids, mocking John Kerry’s military service. They know that this high-minded bullshit doesn’t work. I’ve worried about Obama, because he wants to be this high-minded type, y’know? I’ve “Oh shit, we’re going to get papped again” but then with Biden… OK, then with Biden, because he’s the Vice Presidential nominee, he’s going to get as much media as he wants, he’ll get all the ink in the world, and he’ll throw insults at McCain. Having selected Biden, it shows that the Obama campaign can’t just run this campaign on lofty rhetoric - they’re going to get down and dirty.

MORUS: I couldn’t fail to ask you about Hillary Clinton. Do you think she has made it easier for future female candidates to be seriously considered for the Presidential nomination, and what role do you think she might play in an Obama Administration?

KOS: I think she’ll be a good Senator. I haven’t heard anything that would suggest that she’d want a Cabinet position, though I’m sure it would be there for her if she wanted one. I’d be perfectly fine with that – I mean, I wasn’t happy with the way her campaign was run … I thought it was a disgraceful campaign. It didn’t work, and I think part of the reason was because it was disgraceful. So, she got far, but she also had advantages that other women don’t have – you know, being married to the former two-term President of the United States. Not a lot of… hmmm. I don’t want it to be a world where the only women who can have strong runs at the Presidency are the ones who have married former Presidents. So what - Michelle Obama is our next hope? No! So bottom line, I mean women raise families, they get into politics later, there are other roadblocks to their participation. There are reasons that we have, compared to the industrialised world, some of the lowest rates of representation by women, and until that’s rectified, I think we’re always going to have an imbalance at the top of the ticket. So we need more women Governors, you know? And they’re coming. I was gunning for Sebelius for Vice President, you know, and …

MORUS: Janet Napolitano?

KOS: There’s Janet Napolitano – yeah, they exist, but there are a lot more men who are Governors and Senators etc – so you need a sort of critical mass. We’ve got a while to go. What I do say is that the way in which elections are run is becoming increasingly democratised, and someone like Barack Obama could actually have a shot when he wasn’t the Establishment candidate. He’s black, his name’s ‘Barack’, his middle name’s ‘Hussain’, his last name’s ‘Obama’ I mean this guy’s not exactly the poster child of what a President looks like, right? And so why was he able to do that? I don’t think he could have done this ten years ago. We have technology that allows people to organise, to find things that inspire them – that allows non-traditional candidates to flourish. And that includes female candidates.

MORUS: OK, final question. Mike Smithson, the founding editor of PolticalBetting.com placed a bet at 50/1 on Obama becoming the next POTUS back in May 2005. We like to keep an eye on emerging talent before it’s noticed. Who for you are the young talents of the Democratic Party, the people who might be the next Barack Obama in ten-fifteen years’ time?

KOS: Well, I think Brian Schweitzer the Governor of Montana - he’s my pick in eight years. I think at the lower levels of the House you’ve got some really talented Congressmen and Congresswomen, like Tim Ryan (a Congressman from Ohio). I actually think McCaskill – Claire McCaskill [Senator from Missouri]– is pretty impressive, she has a bright future ahead of her. If we’re looking in eight years, I’d say – because he’s somebody I actually really, really like – is Brian Schweitzer. On the Republican side, Bobby Jindal, the Governor of Louisiana, is one to watch – because they’re the whitest party in the history of the world, they have like one brown guy in the entire party, so they’re like “Look, we’re really not all that white”! So yeah, keep an eye out for Schweitzer and Jindal.

MORUS: Markos Moulitsas, thank you very much indeed.