Claudia Ward Markos Moulitsas Zúniga leads his revolution from the sofa.     News Category: Politics Printer friendly version of this story Email Kara Platoni More stories by Kara Platoni Send a letter to the editor From the Week of Wednesday, December 15, 2004   Bottom Feeder The Butler Did It Ask Jeeves founder tells feds seized money is all legitimate. "Stone Cold" Austin's ex suggests a different possible revenue stream. East Side Story Gettin' Naked for Needles When some East Bay needle exchange advocates found themselves cringing for fundage, they dropped trou. Cityside Outbreak! A rare heroin-related disease strikes the Bay Area. Letters Letters for the week of December 15-21, 2004 Taking us to task for perpetuating the biodiesel lie, and writing in support of the poultry rescue movement.

When Dick Cheney claimed during the vice-presidential debate that he had not met Senator John Edwards until that evening, a Daily Kos reader unearthed TV footage of the two men together at a 2001 prayer breakfast. Before the debate was even over, the image had been posted on the Daily Kos Web site and disseminated by the Kerry campaign.

Then there was the moment when a Daily Kos reader realized that a Bush ad showing the president speaking to an audience of soldiers had been altered to make it appear that the crowd was full of military personnel. The Bush campaign had to apologize.

And when the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced it would preempt normal television programming to air the anti-Kerry hit piece Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal, it was on Daily Kos that outraged readers first organized a boycott of Sinclair's advertisers. The company's stock began to tank, investors complained, and Sinclair ultimately was forced to air a more balanced program instead.

Each time, the Kerry campaign profited without having to lift a finger. Neither, for that matter, did blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of Daily Kos. All he had to do was give people a place to talk.

The meteoric rise of political bloggers during the presidential campaign has sent media types scrambling to parse what it means to have a new army of semiprofessional commentators getting press credentials, covering stories from multiple vantage points and, in many cases, drawing enormous crowds. Prior to the election, a New York Times Magazine cover portraying veteran political journalists R.W. Apple of the Times and Jack Germond of the Baltimore Sun peering over the shoulders of Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox seemed to frame all the tensions created by the rise of this new class of pundit. Did bloggers like Cox and Moulitsas have the credibility of seasoned reporters? Were they even journalists at all, or were they simply journal-keepers? Were they even observers, or merely rabble-rousers with axes to grind?

Several months later, the better question to ask is not how bloggers are changing journalism, but how they're changing politics.

By the time all the dust from the 2004 election had settled, Moulitsas had had an impressively deep impact on the presidential race for someone whose primary tools are nothing more than an opinion and a laptop. He helped launch Democratic candidate Howard Dean's Internet strategy, which first thrust both Web-based fund-raising and opposition to the war in Iraq into the middle of the campaign. He also started the Draft Wesley Clark movement, which solidified the importance of both Web and war to the 2004 campaign, and further encouraged Democratic nominee John Kerry to stake out his own tenuous opposition to the war.

And just as Moulitsas became one of the few people to turn blogging into his own primary source of income, he also turned Daily Kos into a formidable generator of money for others. By the end of the 2004 campaign cycle, his readers had donated more than a half million dollars to the "Kos Dozen" -- actually, fifteen congressional candidates hand-selected by Moulitsas. Online donors often didn't even share a home state with the candidates they were funding.

Perhaps the candidacy most emblematic of this new type of political power was that of rookie congressional candidate Jeff Seemann. In April, Moulitsas made a gaffe that accidentally linked his fortunes to those of Seemann. In writing a post about the four civilian contractors who had been brutally killed in Fallujah on March 31, his emotions overshot his sense of diplomacy. "I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries," he wrote. "Screw them." The response from the political establishment was immediate. The Kerry campaign delinked from his site. Conservative blogs denounced him as a hatemonger and pressed Democratic candidates who advertised on Daily Kos to withdraw their support. Three of them pulled their ads. Daily Kos readers began to worry that the Web site was toast.

Enter longtime blog reader, Daily Kos regular, and long-shot congressional candidate Seemann, who became the first candidate to place a new ad after the pullout. At that moment, things didn't look too bright for Seemann's candidacy. He was an ordinary guy from Canton, Ohio, who had dropped out of college and worked as a disc jockey, sportswriter, and music researcher for Clear Channel Communications. His entry into public life followed an accidental fall that shattered his elbow and taught him that his insurance wouldn't fully cover his medical bills. When the cost of medical care forced Seemann into bankruptcy, he had a revelation about the shoddy state of American health care. Something needed to be done, he decided, so he ran for the House of Representatives from Ohio's sixteenth Congressional District. Given that the Republican incumbent, Ralph Regula, had held the district for 32 years, the Democratic Party wasn't even planning to run anyone for the seat. Regula's last two challengers hadn't even raised the $5,000 necessary to file initial Federal Elections Commission reports.

But once Seemann placed his ad on Moulitsas' Web site, something amazing happened. The Daily Kos community repaid his loyalty by emptying their own wallets. "The place went nuts," recalls Tim Tagaris, who served as Seemann's communications director. "Everyone was so worried about Markos. There became this mini-fund-raising drive for Jeff Seemann."

Seemann's candidacy became highly Web-powered, supported in large part by donors and volunteers from nowhere near Ohio. A half-dozen staff members, including Tagaris, were hired from connections made on Daily Kos or other blogs. Most of the staff, from the candidate on down, routinely visited the blogs to talk shop and make friends. Tagaris posted drafts of Seemann's campaign speeches to solicit critiques; one day the campaign even let the community vote on Seemann's schedule. In the end, Tagaris says, the campaign raised about $60,000, or roughly half of its funding, from Daily Kos readers, and another 35 percent from other Internet sources. Tagaris says Daily Kos "turned a candidate who was destined for anonymity into a viable candidate."

But even with the help of the Daily Kos community, Seemann did little better than his forebears, garnering only about 33 percent of the vote. In fact, the entire Kos Dozen lost -- all fifteen of them. So did Dean. So did Clark. So, of course, did Kerry.

Looking back, the question is not whether blogs like Daily Kos have political power. The question is how should they harness it.

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