Markos 'Kos' Moulitsas on Obama, Twittering, Fighting the Blue Dogs, and the Major Changes Coming

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted May 4, 2009.

DH: How are the new tools Web 2.0-ish?

MM: It's all gonna be highly customizable stuff, the integration of Twitter and Digg. Buzzword, buzzword, buzzword! The idea is, I want the Daily Kos to be back in that cutting-edge mode. And maybe in five years it can be old again and I can re-imagine what it looks like.

But the current Daily Kos -- it works, it's functional, it's growing, but for me, I need a little bit more.

DH: How's the economic side of it? Are you down in advertising?

MM: I'm down horrifically. January was my first profitable January in the site's history. Usually, the first quarter is a disaster. And I always start panicking around early March. And then things always pick up and this year, I was profitable in January, so I thought, this is great and I thought we won't have this first quarter downturn. And February was death.

March was death until a couple of campaigns game through to pull us out of the gutter. But we were extremely profitable last year. And we have a significant chunk of change that we can live off. We have no debt. We've never had anybody invest in the company. We don't owe anybody anything. So it's a kind of good place to be. We have some money to play with, to ride out what's hopefully just a bad quarter, It's scary out there. Economically.

Organizations like the ACLU were big advertisers, and they had money wrapped up in [Bernie] Madoff. They had to cut their budget, they had to cut staff. So of course, the last thing they're going to worry about is advertising. Understandably so.

And we have to assume that things are going to be tough and hope for the best but assume that things are going to be the worst. Like I said, we have reserves to work from. So we're going to be fine, longer term. But that doesn't mean that I don't lose sleep over it sometimes.

DH: Are you Twittering?

MM: Yeah. As of last week. I was down at South by Southwest, and it was infective. It was all anyone could talk about . So I thought, "I could get into this." So I started last week.

DH: Big news: Markos Tweets!

MM: So I wrote a tweet. "Tweet!" -- that's as bad as "blog."

DH: It's worse!

MM: I wrote that Geithner was starting to look like Obama's [Donald] Rumsfeld. Meaning, sort of clinging to someone who looks out of their element, and doesn't seem to have the answers or the confidence. So Fox News picked it up. It was their headline: "Kos says that Geithner is Obama's Rumsfeld," which is not what I said. I guess it's just one more place where people can take my words out of context.

DH: Anything you want to get on the record before we close this down?

MM: I guess I'll make one point: After Obama won the election, people talked a lot about how it's going to be the death of the netroots. "They won, what are people gonna talk about, what are they gonna do?"

And nobody's really asking that anymore. There has been a realization that Obama still has an agenda to sell. We still have Democrats who are not doing their job and need to be knocked out. And that Minnesota Senate race! It's still not up in the air, because we know that Al Franken won the election, but we don't know when he's going to get finally seated. And, of course the media is the media, and we can't properly count on them to do their job without policing them.

So, I think that people are realizing that what we won in November was a battle -- a big battle, an important one -- but that war is ongoing, probably never-ending. And if we really care about our country, and the future, about cleaning up the messes of the last Republican administration -- that we can't disengage, that we have to remain active and assist however we can to make sure not only that Obama's agenda gets through, but that we hold Democrats accountable and that we continue to work to defeat the worst Republicans in the House and the Senate. Because, the fewer of them there are, the less relevant the blue-dog type Democrats and Evan Bayhs of the world become.

So we need to render them as irrelevant as we possibly can.

See more stories tagged with: progressives, blogs, progressive politics, dailykos, markos moulitsas, markos, kos

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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