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After eight years of the most profligate spending ever seen in American history, get ready for the "fiscal conservatives" to rear their heads and decide that if taxpayer dollars aren’t flooding to their K Street donors, we simply can’t afford it:

Conservative Democrats who’ve been a thorn in the side of liberal party leaders could grow into a major obstacle to Barack Obama’s agenda if he is elected president.

Majority Democrats are positioned for big gains in next week’s congressional election. But many of the new faces would join a growing chorus of "Blue Dogs" who often part from the party base on big issues like taxes and increasing federal spending.

That could set up a roadblock for Obama, who has promised to broaden health insurance coverage, start a new round of public works projects and improve early childhood education, among other things — all initiatives that would require substantial government spending at a time of soaring deficits.

The 49 House Blue Dogs — about one in every four House Democrats — could grow by as many as 10 in Tuesday’s election with wins in mainly Southern, conservative-leaning districts. Overall, Democrats are expected to pick up 20 or more House seats.

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Democratic leaders are well aware that even with larger majorities in the House and Senate, infighting among their many factions could upend their ambitious plans.

That’s what happened after Bill Clinton won the White House, and the resulting intramural spats derailed enough Democratic priorities to help usher in the so-called Republican revolution that cost the party control of Congress in 1994.

We can’t let that happen.

There’s a good article in The Hill on the primary project being funded by your donations to our Accountability Now PAC.  As I’ve written before, we’re joining together with others like SEIU, MoveOn, BlogPAC, Kos, Color of Change, They Work For Us and the Steelworkers to start evaluating districts and recruiting progressive primary challengers to corporate con Dems (I was on Rachel Maddow’s show recently talking about it).

You can also hear Markos and Glenn Greenwald talking about it on Glenn’s radio show here.

The article has a couple of errors — the group is not called "Accountability Now," that’s the PAC sponsoring the current research project which is run by Glenn Greenwald and me. And there are no plans to do anything on Colombia Free Trade, that was offered up as an example of how the Blue Dogs might get started on their agenda in a lame duck session and not wait for an Obama administration to begin.  But it should give Blue Dogs and their friends an idea of what’s in store.

The Blue Dog coalition may be growing, but we are too, and after the election we’ll be announcing more groups who will be joining with us.  It may just be a happy coincidence that the Blue Dogs discover fiscal responsibility about healthcare and decide to gut it in a way that makes their insurance company donors happy, but as they get ready to cast those votes they should know someone’s watching.

Let us know about great progressive leaders in your community here. 

Help us watch dog the Blue Dogs by donating to the Primary Project here.