Jon Chait invented the primary challenge?  Who knew.  Glenn Greenwald:

That, of course, was exactly the motivating premise of those who sought to remove Joe Lieberman from the Senate in 2006 — the people Chait demonized back then as "left-wing fanatics" who "refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent."  That was also the principle behind the founding last year of Accountability Now, largely designed to recruit and enable meaningful primary challenges against corrupt, unaccountable, and worthless corporate-serving incumbents. 

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While Chait seems to envision himself as the pioneering inventor of the primary challenge strategy (something he first articulated six weeks ago), Accountability Now has actually been working continuously for the last year on recruiting credible primary challengers and building an infrastructure to support those challenges — all in order to unseat the unresponsive, corrupt and corporate-owned incumbents who ensure that the same factions control government no matter which party is in control.  But the principal barrier to those efforts has been the accurate perception that the White House and President — along with key party institutions such as the DCCC — will use their vast resources to keep Blue Dogs and "centrists" in office and crush any efforts from within the party to unseat them.

It’s hard to overstate how many promising potential primary challengers with whom we’ve spoken –  highly energized and impressive members of City Councils or County Commissions or state legislatures or just private citizens — who are eager to run against their corporate-owned Democratic Congressional but are deterred by one primary fear:  that Obama and the Party infrastructure will undercut their efforts by actively supporting the Blue Dog incumbent.  That fear is particularly pronounced for potential African-American challengers in districts where the corporate-serving "centrist" incumbent is wildly out of step with the interests and views of the typical (and sometimes overwhelmingly African-American) Democratic voter.  Such potential challengers anticipate that Obama will intervene on behalf of the Blue Dog against the progressive challenger — as he’s done before — and sabotage not only their primary challenge but perhaps their future viability as a candidate in their community and district.

Accountability Now premiered to a lot of fanfare after the FISA betrayal last year, but has been somewhat silent since then.  It quickly became clear that the process of recruiting primary opponents was not helped by talking about it, so we had to go publicly quiet for a while.  That does not mean we have been inactive — far from it.  We’ve been diligently working behind the scenes to identify challengers in likely districts, evaluate their viability and get them the help they need to plan solid strategies and set up strong campaign infrastructures.

We  hope we’ll be able to say more soon.  In the mean time, know that while Jon Chait and others were coming to the brilliant realilzation that primary challenges were necessary to make the party responsive to the needs of the public, we were busy trying to make them happen.