FEATURE
Out of Left Field
By: Victor Cruz-Lugo

Once considered an upstart political interloper, leading political blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is inching into the mainstream.

When diehard Democrat Markos Moulitsas Zuniga was just a kid, long before he became the political writer behind Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com), the world’s most popular political blog, he sat in front of his television set in El Salvador and watched armed men take over a local university. They lined up professors and students, and then began shooting them. “I remember the bodies, sort of flopping around as they were being executed. I was seven, I think,” remembers Moulitsas, who was born in Chicago, but moved briefly with his parents to El Salvador. It was the now 34-year-old’s first political memory and one that has colored his view of politics long after his parents took him back to Chicago to escape the civil war in the country of his mother’s birth. “I learned very early on,” he says via phone, “that politics wasn’t just a game.”

Today, Moulitsas, is in mid-book tour, peddling Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, the tome he co-authored with fellow internet blogger and progressive Democrat Jerome Armstrong of MyDD (www.mydd.com).

Crashing the Gate, the pair’s book, proposes that the Democratic Party must find its strength and leadership from outside the cadre of Washington insiders, and turn to its people-powered grassroots base, now strengthened and emboldened by the bloggers and other internet activists who have given that base a voice and a means for raising quick cash. Crashing the Gate goes on to detail the rise of political Internet activists, called netroots, who came to the fore with the historic fundraising and consciousness-raising successes of the 2003 Howard Dean presidential primary run. Dean defied the status quo by raising, mostly via the internet, $50 million in small donor donations that averaged $70, before losing the primary race.

The netroots, a term Moulitsas coined, proved they weren’t going to go away after Supreme Court judges stopped the 2004 presidential electoral recount, putting an end to any hopes for John Kerry. Incensed progressive Internet activists turned to the web to vent their frustrations. They haven’t stopped acting up since. On blogs and Internet sites not unlike Moulitsas’s and Armstrong’s, the netroots provoked and sustained a dialogue about the failures of the Democratic Party, proposed possible solutions, and spewed a torrent of criticism about their rivals within and outside the Party. Most impressively, they’ve raised fast money and plenty of it for candidates in tight spots, and have thereby turned the concept of Democratic funding on its head.

Meanwhile, voices previously shut out of mainstream media, of which Moulitsas was merely one, soon found permanent homes on the Internet. And like Moulitsas, though not as popular, these voices have developed significant followings and have become players on the contemporary political scene.

Crashing the Gate proposes that the netroots “take back” the Democratic Party from the influence of high paid D.C. consultants who repeatedly lose elections. Another challenge, say the authors, is to get single-issue advocacy groups with traditionally Democratic leanings (like environmentalists and pro-choice activists) to look beyond their one concern, think collectively on behalf of the Democratic Party and endorse only candidates within the Party. With Republicans routinely appointing conservative judges who stick around for a long time, Moulitsas argues the progressive American agenda remains imperiled, as do the wishes of all traditionally Democratic-leaning advocacy groups.Crashing the Gate also says Democrats should take on Republicans at every opportunity as opposed to targeting only campaigns that appear winnable, and it challenges progressive Democrats to use their newfound fundraising potential to build a comparable message machine not unlike the Republican idea mills that have produced the crystal clear conservative brand.

“The message [for the Democratic Party],” says Moulitsas, “is to modernize, to realize that we’re not living in 1970 anymore, that the media landscape and the political landscape has changed, and you need
to evolve in order to win.”

The netroots movement has snared a variety of political victories in its few years, including securing Howard Dean’s ascension to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Moreover, ideas like adopting a 50-state strategy and attacking the opposition at every opportunity, have gained momentum.“To me, what is shocking is how much influence we’ve had, given how tiny we are,” Moulitsas says. Known as Kos by his supporters—who, in turn, are often termed Kossacks—Moulitsas states that the burgeoning internet activist movement is only in its infancy.“When we have a million people throwing in twenty bucks here and twenty bucks there, then we have a whole new ballgame,” he says.

Blogging, or essentially creating an online diary, isn’t something that was new to Moulitsas when he founded Daily Kos. While a law student in Chicago, Moulitsas ran an Internet site called the Hispanic Latino News Service, updating information on it at a snail’s pace years before blogging technology became available. “When blogging came along, I was like ‘this is what I used to do, but now it’s easy’,” he recalls. In 2002, Moulitsas started Daily Kos to talk about that year’s mid-term elections and the Iraq War. Having served three years in the U.S. Army, he felt he had earned a right to speak publicly about both of those subjects. In 2003 he gave up his job as a project manager at a web development company to enter full time into the fray of national politics. With fellow blogger Armstrong, he formed a consulting team that worked for Howard Dean and other clients. Since 2004, Moulitsas has lived off the ad revenues generated from his site.

The Kossacks face a daunting task. The Republicans, says Moulitsas, have had a 30-year lead on the Democrats in terms of building the sort of message machine, which include conservativeleaning think tanks and news outlets like Fox News that, he says, slants the news toward the right. But now that technology has let the political fundraising genie out of the bottle, the netroots are free to more effectively promote their agenda.“People sit around and wait for a leader to emerge,” Moulitsas says. “We don’t need to do that anymore.”

And if the guest list at this month’s first YearlyKos Political Conference in Las Vegas is any indication, the progressive netroots message has inched further into the mainstream. Presidential hopefuls Mark Warner and Tom Vilsack, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and California Senator Barbara Boxer, all Democrats, of course, plan to attend the Yearly Kos Conference. Members of the beltway’s political consulting culture, who Moulitsas continues to lambaste, will likely take a pass. H

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