AB: Do you feel like an outsider in the media world when you're in Iowa or you're in Michigan or where ever you may end up?

RM: I kind of always feel like an outsider. I remember when I walked – when MSNBC asked me to do Iowa night coverage, I was so flattered that they asked me, it was really nice. I mean, I don't work for them, they don't pay me – and I had been expecting to anchor Air America's coverage that night, but when MSNBC asked me to do it, I was like, "Oh, that's really nice". So, I showed up that night and walked into the make-up room and there are Kelly O'Donnell, an anchor I don't know and Keith Olbermann sitting in the make-up room and I walked in and, like an idiot, without thinking, say, "Aw, I feel like I'm getting bumped up from the kid's table at Thanksgiving," which was a dumb thing to say because A. self-deprecation doesn't help in a professional context if you're trying to seem like a bigger deal than you are and, B, I'm subliminally calling them old, which is not a nice thing. But that's honestly how I felt: I get to be in the adult media! I do feel like – I dress like a first grader, I'm a big lesbian, I'm not pretty like a Barbie doll and I come from talk radio, which is the wild west of media… In a lot of ways I do not fit the mold, but I get a lot of air time and I have a great time doing it and always really happy to be up there, otherwise I wouldn't do it at all.

AB: The election can be overwhelming. I'm thinking about the next ten, eleven months of covering this and it sort of makes me sick.

RM: I know. Especially if Hillary Clinton is going to be one of the people who goes the distance. Whether or not she gets the nomination, she's certainly going to be – imagine if Barack Obama gets the nomination, even if that's true, it's not like Hillary Clinton isn't going to be there until the very, very end. If we still have to go through the ridiculous "She can't show emotion, because she's too much of a woman," "She's not showing emotion, she's an ice queen:" this stuff from 1970! Pundits are not able to grasp a woman candidate at all! Like Drudge showing the pictures of the lines on her face…

AB: That's so fucked up.

RM: He does it all the time! And, you know, if Barack Obama goes the distance – it's like you're in a Rudyard Kipling novel when you talk about him: "Oh, the third world candidate, the son of Kenya…" The racist bullshit!

AB: What's interesting about the race and campaigns – especially when Barack and Hillary made peace a few weeks back – we have two things happening here. We have a black man running for president – and he could very well win this election – so naturally that's going to bring up topics of race, which I think, in the end, is good, because America needs to talk about race a little more.

RM: True.

AB: But then we have the campaigns saying "We're not going to talk about race". How can we strike a balance between race doesn't become a campaign issue and ensuring that Americans use this opportunity to talk about race?

RM: I think that's really going to be a key point. I think that Obama has essentially – Obama and Clinton both – their little truce was saying "Let's not bicker about Martin Luther King, let's agree that Martin Luther King was a good guy. Let's agree that we're pro civil rights". I think they're saying, "Let's not have a fake fight about race". And race is not – in politics – a fight about race is not going to serve us well. A conversation about race is – and I think it's going to be hard to do. I think the way to do it is to talk about the different experiences of white Americans and black Americans today in 2008 in terms of domestic issues that often don't get a racial run put on them: access to health care, access to the economy, job issues, prison issues, criminal justice issues, the racist elements of the immigration debate. If we can be overt about how race effects all of these other political issues that we never mention race about, I think we'll be better off.