Transcript for June 11

MR. RUSSERT: General Barry McCaffrey, we thank you for your views, and your reports on Iraq and Afghanistan are also linked to our MEET THE PRESS Web site.

Coming next, the liberal Internet bloggers strut their stuff in Vegas. And a hard-headed look as to whether the Democrats can recapture control of the Senate or the House this November. That’s all coming up right here on MEET THE PRESS.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: The blogosphere, the Internet, Decision 2006 and 2008. Our political roundtable after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: Welcome, all. Markos Moulitsas, let me start with you out in Las Vegas. You’ve been hosting a convention of liberal bloggers and political activists. What do you think your convention has achieved?

MR. MARKOS MOULITSAS: Well, you know, there’s this perception of bloggers as being these anti-social people, typing away at keyboards in their parents’ basement. And I think what we’ve seen is that actually the people who read these blogs are a real cross section of the Democratic Party, a real cross section of America. We have all age groups represented; we have people that are blue collar, white collar. And at the end of the day, no matter how much they may love to be online and use the blogs to find each other, they crave that flesh-and-blood interaction, and that’s what they’re doing here today.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think the blogosphere has become to liberal activists what talk radio is to conservative activists?

MR. MOULITSAS: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a very apt analogy. The idea being that here, finally, we have a place where good, strong, progressive voices can get together, and we can talk, and we can motivate each other, and we can organize, and we can do and plan the kind of hard work that it takes to win elections. Republicans and conservatives learned this awhile ago—you know, decades ago—it’s, you know, it’s about time we learned that lesson as well.

MR. RUSSERT: What role do you believe blogosphere and the Internet will play in the 2006 midterm elections, the 2008 presidential election?

MR. MOULITSAS: I think the role’s going to get bigger and bigger as the movement grows. I mean, we saw how powerful the movement was back in 2003 during the Howard Dean rise. And at the time, the blog world was about a twentieth of the size it is today. So it’s going to be influential.

Now, does that mean we can actually deliver an election? Probably not. But what we can do is we can generate the buzz, we can raise some money, and we can act as a rapid reaction force the way that conservative talk radio and conservative television like Fox News has done for so long.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me bring in Byron York of nationalreview.com, a conservative writer-blogger, a fish out of water out there in Las Vegas, covering the convention.

And, Byron, you wrote this: “There is no doubt that DailyKos, like the left-wing blogosphere in general, has lots of readers.

“Of course, so do blogs on the right. The difference is that bloggers on the right spend most of their time commenting on the news of the day, while bloggers on the left claim to be building a new political movement, one that is revolutionizing Democratic-party politics. ...

“At this moment, the left-wing blogosphere is not only the most energetic force inside the Democratic Party - it is also the most divisive. The question now is whether it will contribute to Democratic victories in midterm elections this November, or instead end up being the Republicans’ not-so-secret weapon as they fight off their own problems and try to keep control of Congress.” Why would you suggest that the liberal blogosphere would be a weapon to help the Republicans?

MR. BYRON YORK: Well, I think, I think for the very reason that Markos alluded to. There were a couple of themes that, that I saw at the convention out here. The first theme was, “We’ve arrived, we’re a force to be reckoned with, and they’re going to have to pay attention to us.” As Markos said in his speech on Thursday night, he said, “We’re turning the political world upside down.” But the other theme that you saw out here was, “People don’t pay attention to us. They think we’re crazy. They think we’re extremist, liberal bloggers.” And Markos actually kind of fuses those two ideas by saying, by kind of creating a classic populist appeal, which is, “Those elites in Washington, they don’t pay attention to us, they think we’re the riffraff. But you wait, we’re going to get together, we’re going to storm the gates, and we’re going to kick them all out.”

Now, the problem is, is that we don’t really know how representative they are of the entire Democratic coalition. For example, black voters are a huge part of the Democratic coalition, and Internet activists are overwhelmingly white, as were the participants at the convention out here, and what you would see at a number of meetings staged by moveon.org, the very big liberal Internet activist group. So whether they can actually put together a winning formula is just still unclear to me.

MR. RUSSERT: Markos Moulitsas, it’s also interesting that some of your fellow Democrats have made comments. The Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack, said that Democrats shouldn’t be banging each other around. Let me—Marshall Wittmann of the Democratic Leadership Council said this, and I’ll read it for you and our viewers. “[Left-wing bloggers] are an echo chamber that speaks to a hyper-partisan, very liberal slice of even the Democratic Party. As of yet, they have not produced any political results. Their most celebrated activity was the Dean (2004 presidential) campaign. The last time I checked, there was not a President Dean.” How do you respond to that?

MR. MOULITSAS: You know, Byron York talks about there being a kind of a populist clash, and, you know, it’s true in a lot of ways. You have people in D.C. that have these nice, cozy little realms of power, and they don’t want to give them up. They don’t want to realize that there’s a lot of energy and intelligence and passion outside of Washington, D.C. D.C. is a bubble. These people have lost touch with real America. They think they know better than anybody else, while we’re saying, “Look. The real action, the real excitement in the Democratic Party is happening in the states.”

And this isn’t a leftist movement. The first person to agree to speak at this conference was the House—the Senate Minority leader Harry Reid, who’s an anti-abortion, moderate-to-conservative Democrat. The second person, Governor Mark Warner of Virginia, who’s a moderate centrist governor of a red state. So these people aren’t coming here because they’re speaking to the far left of the Democratic Party, they’re coming here because they realize that the blogosphere actually is the big tent of the Democratic Party. We have people on the left, the center, the right and everything in between and up and down the party spectrum. This is what we are. We are a cross section of the Democratic Party.

MR. RUSSERT: Has Mark Warner, the governor—the former governor of Virginia, emerged as a popular figure amongst liberal bloggers?

MR. MOULITSAS: He is one of the top three choices in all the early straw polling that we’ve done ourselves for the 2008 nomination. And given that—the fact that he is, you know, perceived as a moderate to centrist Democrat, I think that speaks a lot to how pragmatic we are as a movement. A lot of people like Russ Feingold, a lot of people love Wes Clark and a lot of people like Governor Mark Warner because we are in a lot of ways looking for results. And whether he’s centrist or left—or rightist or whatever he might be—Governor Mark Warner in Virginia has delivered.

MR. RUSSERT: You didn’t mention Senator Hillary Clinton. Is she a favorite amongst liberal bloggers?

MR. MOULITSAS: Not, not really, not really. It doesn’t mean they hate her. You know, there’s a difference. I mean, we’re not necessarily Rush Limbaugh listeners and have it out for her. And I think most people in the, in the, in the net routes really appreciate Hillary Clinton as a senator. She actually has voted the right way on pretty much everything except maybe the Iraq war. So the disdain that people have for Hillary a lot, is not because she’s too liberal or too conservative or too moderate or anything else like that. This is the picture that a lot of people in Washington, D.C., want to paint. The reason Hillary Clinton isn’t necessarily well liked is because she’s seen as part of the establishment, as part of the people that brought us the troubles that the Democratic Party is suffering today.

MR. RUSSERT: What about Al Gore?

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