![]() ![]() Every third week, Moulitsas has a standing phone call with congressional powerbroker Rep. This record, combined with the sheer vigor and clarity of his online manifestos, has brought Moulitsas, a 34-year-old Californian whom nobody had heard of until three years ago, to the attention of the Democratic establishment, first as a resented adversary and now, increasingly, a kind of part-time sage, an affiliate member. And, thanks to his early and enthusiastic backing of Howard Dean’s campaign for the party’s presidential nomination, Moulitsas became perhaps the key player in Dean’s Internet-based rise to prominence. In addition, Moulitsas used the site to raise $500,000 for Democratic candidates in the last election cycle–making him one of the party’s top fund-raisers. That’s more than the top 10 opinion magazines–of both left and right–combined, more readers than any political publication has had, ever, in the history of the world. The site, which has existed for only around three and a half years, now has 3.7 million readers each week. Moulitsas’s appearance before the Democratic caucus was a verbal version of what he writes every day on his blog, DailyKos. “I’m not sure everyone really knew what to think,” one Senate aide told me. As he held forth, urging Democrats to rely upon technology and embrace partisanship and confrontation, Moulitsas’s audience was one-part bewildered, one-part overwhelmed, and maybe a little inspired. DAILY KOS STUPID LIBERAS FULLHe can be so intense and high-strung, so full of kinetic energy, that the sheer performance of his speeches–he never writes them out, just talks off-the-cuff–can be distracting, like watching snakes fighting in a bag. Moulitsas told the assembled crowd that they, the establishment, had mismanaged party strategy for too long and that he, Markos, had a better plan. The party had just lost its third election in a row, and his audience, a self-flagellatory group at the best of times, was feeling glum and a little bit desperate. Johnson room of the capitol where he’d been invited to give Senate Democrats a post mortem on what went wrong. ![]() I hate Washington.Īnd yet there he was, just after the 2004 elections, in the ornate Lyndon B. Moulitsas’s career to this point has been a bet that enough other people share this very precise, nearly sub-articulate animus. To him, it’s not that these people have the wrong values or priorities. ![]() He’s talking about Democratic Washington: the liberal Ivy League mandarins, consultants, and wonks, many of them refugees from the Clinton administration, insiders whom he believes have run the Democratic Party and the progressive movement into the ground, by valuing compromise over confrontation. ![]() When Moulitsas says Washington, he’s not talking about Bush’s Washington with its pitched partisan camps and pay-to-play ethos. But Moulitsas, who is the world’s biggest political blogger, says it differently, with a freshly arrived-at and deeply felt zeal, as if he himself has discovered the place and its pathologies anew. Many people, of course, say that they hate Washington. I hate Washington,” says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. ![]()
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