Kos to Dems: Toe Populist Line — or Else

ABC News’ Teddy Davis reports: Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the liberal DailyKos blog, helped launch a political action committee on Thursday called Accountability Now which will target congressional Democrats who become "more responsive to corporate America than to their constituents." Moulitsas spoke about the new PAC at ABC’s Washington Bureau.
Ferdous Al-Faruque/ ABC News Leading progressives are putting congressional Democrats on notice that they will recruit and support primary challenges to vulnerable incumbents who become "more responsive to corporate America than to their constituents." "We don’t want a repeat of 1994 and we don’t want our own version of 2006," said Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the liberal DailyKos blog, invoking two recent elections in which the congressional party in power was voted out of office. To ensure that congressional Democrats do not lose touch with their constituents, Moulitsas visited ABC News’ Washington bureau Thursday to promote the launch of Accountability Now PAC. The new political action committee is supported not only by DailyKos but also by MoveOn.org, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), ColorofChange.org, Democracy for America, 21st Century Democrats, and BlogPAC. Accountability Now, which was co-founded by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com, draws its inspiration from the way in which former Rep. Al Wynn, D-Md., was ousted from office in 2007 by current Rep. Donna Edwards, a more liberal Democrat, who portrayed Wynn as beholden to corporate interests. The liberal group has been described as the liberal equivalent of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that backs primary challenges to Republican incumbents who vote for higher taxes. The founders of Accountability Now, however, go to great pains to reject the comparison, saying that they are not interested in backing primary challengers with no chance of winning as the Club for Growth did in 2006 when it unsuccessfully backed Republican Steve Laffey in a primary challenge to Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a liberal Republican who voted against the Bush tax cuts. "We’re obsessed with polling," said Moulitsas. The founders of Accountability Now say they do not insist on down-the-line liberalism from their candidates. To buttress their argument, they point to Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, two Democrats who won surprise victories in 2006 with the help of liberal bloggers. Both have conservative positions on guns while also being strong economic populists. Looking ahead to 2010, Accountability Now does not yet know the specific Democratic apostasies that it will seek to punish. Issues that the group will monitor include universal health care, tax fairness, and cramdown legislation that provides bankruptcy judges with the power to rewrite mortgage terms. "If you’re carrying water for the banking industry in 2009, the odds are that you’re not voting your district," Jeff Hauser, Accountability Now’s executive director, told ABC News. Although Accountability Now has not yet generated a list of Democratic incumbents it wants to target, it is already reaching out to left-leaning blogs around the country to familiarize itself with potential primary challengers. "I’d like everyone to be primaried," said Moulitsas while noting that Accountability Now PAC will focus on a small handful of races. Asked to defend the wisdom of backing challenges to incumbent Democrats, given that Connecticut Sen. Joe Liberman managed to get re-elected even after Ned Lamont denied him the Democratic Party’s Senate nomination in 2006, Moulitsas said Lieberman was saved by a "quirk in Connecticut law" that allowed him to appear on the general election ballot as the candidate of his own party. "2012 is the last of Joe Lieberman," said Moulitsas. "My fear is he will retire. I want to take him out in an election." ABC News’ David Chalian and Ferdous Al-Faruque contributed to this report.