On Monday night, I had the chance to sit down with my friend Jesse Cornett, who's running for the Democratic state Senate nomination in a district that covers the eastern part of Portland.

Jesse served eight years as a member of the United States Army Reserves and the Oregon Army National Guard, and has worked under leading Oregonian politicians such as Senator Ron Wyden, former Senator Mark Hatfield, Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, and Congressman Earl Blumenauer. He has also worked in numerous campaigns and has been involved in the creation of two key parts of Oregon's progressive infrastructure: the Bus Project, discussed during the interview, and Blue Oregon, a Democratic blog community.

Jesse is a great guy who exemplifies the qualities we all look for in a progressive politician. He really is a rising star in Oregon politics, but he needs support today so he can achieve great things in the future. Check out his website and consider throwing him a Hamilton or two; I just shot him $100, for what it's worth. Also, listen to the interview here (warning, a 14.1 megabyte .wav file) or read the transcript below.

Jonathan Singer: Jesse, you're a fighting Democrat in many ways, not just having served our country but also standing up for progressive ideals. What would you say about yourself being a fighting Democrat?

Jesse Cornett: I've heard that a lot lately, and it's really funny because I've never really though of myself in quite those terms, and under the nature of a campaign that's how I've presented myself, but I guess it's true.

I think there are many, many things that the Democrats should be fighting for nationwide, locally here in Oregon that we're not. For instance, tonight I just came from a Medicare forum on the blunder that is Part D, which I had very little idea about before 10 days ago. That's one thing, the three Members of Congress from here - Hooley, DeFazio and Blumenauer - who voted against it, where they're talking about the blunder that it is and potential changes. That's one area.

Locally here, I got into this race because there's just a ton we can do to find stable and adequate funding for our schools. 600,000 Oregonians are without healthcare coverage. We have no rainy day fund in the state when things go south. These are things Democrats have been talking about but not fighting for. So those are I'm just really excited to fight for.

Singer: You didn't really wake up the morning of the filing deadline intending to run. Can you tell us a little bit about how you happen to be running for state Senate today?

Cornett: Sure. I was supposed to be in Philomath with my boss most of that day.

Singer: Your boss being the Secretary of State.

Cornett: Right. The Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury. I was supposed to be staffing him for a rotary lunch and a couple of high school visits and I found someone to cover for me that day so I could be in the capitol because it was filing deadline, and there's lots of politicos around and a lot of connections to make. So I decided to stay around and I was going to help the elections division. I was the guy that was actually going to post all of the names on the board as people filed to run for office.

At about 2:00 that day, I first went up to the House chamber, where they accept filings in filing day, and one of the elections managers physically turned me around, away from the House chamber and said to me, "Now you know, weird things happen with political people like you on days like today, so you shouldn't go anywhere near there." And I just laughed and said, "You're crazy Fred. What could happen?" And laughed it off.

About a half and hour, 45 minutes later, I saw essentially my state Senator's roommate come in and fill out the paperwork to file for the state Senator's seat. That just kind of made me scratch my head. And within 15 to 20 more minutes - by about 3:00 - I was able to determine that the state Senator, with overwhelming likelihood, was going to be removing his name and his roommate, long term friend was going to run for the seat.

I have considered running for office in the past, and over the course of the next hour that followed was able to determine that I could get at least some basic level of support and that my family was supportive, and immediately took leave of absence - I haven't been back since to work - and set forth. We have a democracy in this country. That's not how elections are decided, and that was wrong, and I had to do it. And there's a lot of other good that could come of it also.

Singer: This is a district that, correct me if I'm wrong, leans Democratic. There certainly would be a Republican challenge in the general election, but in all likelihood it could be decided in the Democratic primary? No?

Cornett: Sure. It's not like the inner Portland seats where - for instance Avel Gordly, who represents the Senate district next to me - it's over when you win the Democratic primary, there's no question about it. My seat there's about a 12-point Democratic registration edge. It's a pretty conservative Democratic district. I would like to think that it's over in the primary, but there's still a certain amount of campaigning that has to be done. It's not walk away from it like some of the seats in Oregon are able to do. I'll be able to work a little bit and campaign.

Singer: So you have a month and a half - not even two months - until the primary election. What's happening between now and then? What are you doing to get the nomination?

Cornett: It's been less than three weeks since I filed. I have until the 28th of April, which is a month and a day from today, until the ballots come out. Until then, we are doing absolutely nothing but talking to people through calling people and raising money; mailing to voters in the district based on the money we raise; every single night with very few exceptions I'm out knocking on doors talking to people, hundreds and hundreds of doors a week. I hit 200 yesterday. I will be out every single other night this week, except maybe Friday night. There's a Mariners game in town, but I still might get in a couple of hours before I go down to that. Over the weekend, Saturday and Sunday, I'll probably spend another 12 hours. We're talking to hundreds and hundreds of voters a week. We're using volunteers to do this. We're going to be calling voters. Once the fundraising goals are met, my day is going to be spent calling voters in the district personally. There's no other way to win this race than contacting voters through every means possible.

Singer: You've got a background in grassroots politics. You were my mentor back in 2000 in the Gore campaign, but you also founded the Bus Project - we're at an event for the Bus Project now. Can you tell some of the folks what the Bus Project is about? How you came to get involved it?

Cornett: Sure. The Bus Project... I'll say right now we're at the Rogue Brewpub in Northwest Portland. It's the birthplace of the Oregon Bus Project.

In 2000, I went to the Democratic National Convention right before working on the Democratic coordinated campaign and the Gore campaign of 2000. After that experience of going to the Convention and then working on the campaign, as 2001 came around, people started turning to me, "I know so-and-so, they're your age, they want to get involved, what should they do?" And I just didn't have any answers. We didn't have a Young Democrats. X-Pac was an organization that was left-leaning - (Portland City Commissioner) Erik Sten, who is here tonight, was one of the co-founders of that - it was left leaning, but it was sort of imploding at the time. It was just done; it had served its purpose.

People kept turning to me and asking, "What should we do?" And I had no idea. I was so discouraged by the 2000 campaign that I almost had no interest in it. And after months of this, September 11th happened, and October - or it was early November - I called finally everyone who said we should do something, I said, "Okay, let's meet at Rogue Brewpub, let's sit down here and talk about this." Jefferson Smith, who is the real co-founder of the Bus Project - he gives me great credit as being a co-founder, which I take more now than ever - but he had the idea of the bus. We had some people there with media experience, marketing experience, grassroots experience, we had lawyers, we had 14, 15 people. It was amazing the depth of experience we had at the table that night. Out of that came the Bus Project.

Now it's a hundreds of thousands of dollars a year operation that's gotten thousands of people involved in politics. And that's one area where I'm really highlighting in the campaign. In my campaign I'm talking about a number of issues, and people say, "What do you know about getting more healthcare coverage for Oregonians?" And it's pretty easy for me to say, "I actually don't know. But we have experts everywhere. What I do know is who those people are in this state." You have a Mitch Greenlick (state Rep.), Alan Bates (state Sen.), (former Gov.) John Kitzhaber... we know who the people are. I don't have all the solutions, but what I've done over and over again since the Bus Project - this was the same thing I did with Blue Oregon, the same thing I did with some pretty significant campaign finance changes we have now in statute in Oregon - I find all the people who have the expertise, I bring them together, and something good always seems to come. That won't be the case every time, but that was the case with the Bus Project and that will be the case, I would guess, many times in the future.

Singer: Let's talk about the campaign finance and the work that you do at the Secretary of State's office.

Cornett: Sure.

Singer: Oregon's a really progressive state, but it doesn't have campaign limits, but you brought in some changes to clean up government. In a year that Republican corruption is really resonating with voters, how does your background prepare you well to run on issues like that?

Cornett: In Oregon, our campaign finance - we're one of a very few number of states wher we have no limits whatsoever, and we don't have publicly-financed campaign, with the exception of Portland now. What we have is a system of disclosure.

Prior to this year we had really weak disclosure laws. We report twice before each election, once right after the election, and then annually in September. It really doesn't give the public any way to follow the money in Oregon politics on a regular basis. We don't even have so much as an online tracking system. We finally, last year, started putting PDFs online, which was a great start, but even for me, I have high-speed DSL, it's impossible to download the PDFs for some of the bigger campaigns over the past few years.

So what we've done is we've changed it where we're going to everything online and we have a system which is unique to Oregon, no other state has ever done this, it's called continuous reporting. It's kind of an ambiguous term. Continuous means within 30 days, except when you're close to an election it's within 7 days, you have to file you campaign finance transactions. As opposed to now where you have pretty lengthy, complicated reports, after the first of next year, all you're going to have to do is file your transactions within 30 days or within 7 days, depending on the time period. The system puts it online in a searchable format instantly, you don't have to file the complicated reports, if you get a contribution you can get online and file it right now, you don't need to wait until the filing period, but you must file it within 30 days of receiving it. So it gives the public just an incredible view of where the money's coming from and going to. Same thing with expenses. Just file the transactions.

Singer: Before, if there was a lobbyist who was interested in off-shore drilling outside Cannon Beach, 100 yards off of the coast. He puts down $100,000 into your campaign the last week, no one knows till after.

Cornett: As you're close to the election, there are two supplemental reports you do. If he puts it in within the last few days of the campaign, it's going to be really hard to know until after the campaign. The situation now, in those last critical couple days, it'll be a similar situation, but it's the weeks, years and months leading up to that that we've improved drastically.

Singer: If there's just one more issue that you're really going to hammer at between now and the next couple months, and then hopefully in the months up till September, October November, what would that issue be?

Cornett: In Oregon, we have dotted all over the place payday loan stores. People can go in, so long as you have a job, all you have to do is show these people a paycheck stub and they'll loan you up to $500 dollars and they charge you $20 per $100. If you do the math on how much they charge you, it works out to 521 percent annual interest. It is absolutely outrageous. It's usury and it should be illegal. And that's one thing that I've been talking about. It's not a positive subject, but it's something that I've been talking about that people are very receptive to that I think we can go down and make absolute positive change for. There's a group in Oregon, Our Oregon Coalition, that is working to get a ballot issue on the November ballot. I'm going to be actually carrying that door-to-door as soon as it gets approved for circulation. The legislature, (Republican House Speaker) Karen Minnis has finally said, because the cities are starting to regulate it, has finally said that she is willing to do something at the state level, though she absolutely bottled up every bill in the past on this ever that's come up in the Oregon House since she's been Speaker.

It's something that has to be fixed in this state and something that I'm... I know a lot of people very close to me who have taken these. The people I know that have taken them have used them in a relatively responsible manner where they actually pay the $20 dollars per $100 off at the end of the two-week period. But most people don't have a means to pay it off. They just roll it over. They just pay another $20 and try to pay it off in two weeks, and they never actually come up with enough to do it, it gets rolled over and rolled over and rolled over.

Singer: You can pay thousands in interest and still have the principal you haven't paid off. That's a great thing to hopefully change in the future.

Cornett: I think so. I'm positive for the ballot measure. I'm feeling great about it. If it doesn't happen we'll work on it in Salem.

Singer: Terrific. And you've got a website?

Cornett:JesseCornett.com

Singer:JesseCornett.com. I'll link to it as well. But thanks a lot.

Cornett: Thank you very much.

[THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.]