Blogs: Political pundits are here

NYT has a story on the political bloggers by Matthew Klam. Just for the record, the entire text follows.Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail:Nine blocks north of Madison Square Garden, next door tothe Emerging Artists Theater, where postersadvertised ''The Gay Naked Play'' (''Now With MoreNudity''), the bloggers were up and running. It wasRepublican National Convention week in New York City, andthey had taken over a performance space called the Tank. Ahomeless guy sat at the entrance with a bag of cans at hisfeet, a crocheted cap on his head and his chin in hishand. To reach the Tank, you had to cross a crummy littlecourtyard with white plastic patio furniture and half amotorcycle strung with lights and strewn with flowers,beneath a plywood sign that said, ''Ronald Reagan MemorialFountain.''The Tank was just one small room, with theater lights onthe ceiling and picture windows that looked out on theparking garage across 42nd Street. Free raw carrots andradishes sat in a cardboard box on a table by the door,alongside a pile of glazed doughnuts and all the coffeeyou could drink. The place was crowded. Everyone wassitting, staring at their laptops, at bridge tables orcompletely sacked out on couches. Markos Moulitsas, whoruns the blog Daily Kos, at dailykos.com, was slouched inthe corner of one squashed-down couch in shorts and a T-shirt, his computer on his lap, one of the keys snappedoff his keyboard. He's a small guy with short brown hairwho could pass for 15. Duncan Black of the blog Eschaton,who goes by the name Atrios, sat at the other end of thecouch, staring out the window. On the table set up behindthem, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD worked sweatily. Jesse andEzra, whose blog is called Pandagon, were lying with twocute women in tank tops -- Ezra's girlfriend Kate and Zoeof Gadflyer -- on futon beds that had been placed on thetiny stage of the performance space. Their computers andwireless mice and some carrots and radishes and paperplates with Chinese dumplings were scattered between them.A month ago, at the Democratic convention, Zoe hadaccidentally spilled a big cup of 7-Up on Jesse'scomputer, killing it. She and Jesse now looked as if theymight be dating.Moulitsas pulled a 149-word story off nytimes.com linkingRobert Novak, the conservative columnist, to ''Unfit forCommand,'' the book that attacked John Kerry's service inVietnam; the article revealed that Novak's son is themarketing director for the book's publisher, Regnery.Moulitsas copied and pasted the story, wrote ''Novak blowsanother one'' at the top and clicked Submit. A couple ofseconds later, the item appeared on Daily Kos, and hishundreds of thousands of readers began to take note, manyof them posting their own fevered thoughts in response.Moulitsas read some e-mail messages and surfed around,trying to think of the next rotten thing to say about theright. Beside him, around the same time, Atrios wasassembling a few words about Ed Schrock, a conservativeRepublican congressman vocal in his disavowal of therights of gays, who had now been accused of soliciting gaylove. A Web site dedicated to exposing closeted antigaypoliticians had posted an audio clip of what they said wasSchrock's voice, and he had pulled out of the race. Apizza-stained paper plate sat between Moulitsas andAtrios. Together, they have more readers than ThePhiladelphia Inquirer.A year ago, no one other than campaign staffs and chronicinsomniacs read political blogs. In the late 90's, aboutthe only places online to write about politics weremessage boards like Salon's Table Talk or Free Republic, aconservative chat room. Crude looking Web logs, or blogs,cropped up online, and Silicon Valley techies put them touse, discussing arcane software problems with colleagues,tossing in the occasional diaristic riff on the birth of adaughter or a trip to Maui. Then in 1999, Mickey Kaus, aveteran magazine journalist and author of a weighty bookon welfare reform, began a political blog on Slate. Onkausfiles, as he called it, he wrote differently. Therewere a thousand small ways his voice changed; in print, hehad been a full-paragraph guy who carefully backed up hisclaims, but on his blog he evolved into an exasperatedLarry David basket case of self-doubt and indignation,harassed by a fake ''editor'' of his own creation whobroke in, midsentence, with parenthetical questions andaccusations.All that outrage, hand wringing, writing posts all daylong -- the care and maintenance of an online writingpersona -- after five years, it takes its toll. I hadtalked to Kaus earlier in the summer at a restaurant inVenice, Calif., and he had said he didn't know how muchlonger he could stand it. After the election, he said, hemight just give up. Once, he told me, ''I was halfwayacross the room about to blog a dream I just had, withoutever regaining consciousness, before I realized what I wasabout to do. If the computer hadn't been in the otherroom, I probably would have.''In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and AmericanLife Project found that more than two million Americanshave their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads. The blogsthat succeed, like Kaus's, are written in a strong,distinctive, original voice. In January, a serious-mindedformer editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education namedAna Marie Cox reinvented herself online as the Wonkette, afoulmouthed, hard-drinking, sex-obsessed politics junkie.Joshua Micah Marshall, in his columns for The Hill andarticles for The Washington Monthly, writes like everyother overeducated journalist. But on his blog, TalkingPoints Memo, he has become an irate spitter of well-crafted vitriol aimed at the president, whom he compared,one day, to Tony Soprano torching his friend's sporting-goods store for the sake of a little extra cash. WhenMarshall's in a bad mood, he portrays mainstreamjournalists as a bunch of ''corrupt,'' ''idiotic'' hacks,mired in ''cosmopolitan and baby-boomer self-loathing,''whose bad habits have become ''ingrained and chronic, likea battered dog who cowers and shakes when the abuser givesa passing look.'' Moulitsas's site, Daily Kos, teems withinformation -- sophisticated analysis of poll numbers,crystal-ball babble, links to Senate, House andgovernor ''outlook charts.'' But what pulls you in is notthe data; it's his voice. He's cruel and superior, and heknows his side is going to win.Early in 2002, Joe Trippi read on Armstrong's blog, MyDD,that Howard Dean might be running for president, and afterTrippi joined the campaign as its manager, he helped bringthe Dean movement to life online, in part through thecampaign's massive community blog, which connectedDeaniacs all over the country, helped them organize andbecame the access point for the $40 million that fueledDean's explosive run. The Dean phenomenon drew so many newpeople to the grass roots (or ''netroots,'' as the Deanbloggers used to call them) of presidential politics thata kind of fragmentation occurred in what had been, untilthen, a blog culture dominated by credentialed gentlemenlike Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, aconservative law professor whose blog, Instapundit, isread faithfully at the White House.But just as Fox News has been creaming CNN, the traffic onKaus's and Sullivan's sites has flat-lined recently, whileAtrios's and Moulitsas's are booming. Left-wing politicsare thriving on blogs the way Rush Limbaugh has dominatedtalk radio, and in the last six months, the angrier,nastier partisan blogs have been growing the fastest.Daily Kos has tripled in traffic since June. JoshMarshall's site has quadrupled in the last year. It'salmost as though, in a time of great national discord, youdon't want to know both sides of an issue. The once-soothing voice of the nonideological press has become, tomany readers, a secondary concern, a luxury, evensomething suspect. It's hard to listen to a calm andrational debate when the building is burning and yourpants are smoking.But at the same time that blogs have moved away from thepolitical center, they have become increasinglyinfluential in the campaigns -- James P. Rubin, JohnKerry's foreign-policy adviser, told me, ''They're thefirst thing I read when I get up in the morning and thelast thing I read at night.'' Among the Washington presscorps, too, their impact is obvious. Back in 2002,Marshall helped stoke the fires licking at Trent Lott'sfeet, digging up old interviews that suggested his supportfor Strom Thurmond's racial policies went way back;Marshall's scoops found their way onto The AssociatedPress wire and the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.Earlier this month, a platoon of right-wing bloggerslaunched a coordinated assault against CBS News and itsmemos claiming that President Bush got special treatmentin the National Guard; within 24 hours, the bloggers'obsessive study of typefaces in the 1970's migrated ontoDrudge, then onto Fox News and then onto the networks andthe front pages of the country's leading newspapers.During the 1972 presidential campaign, Timothy Crousecovered the campaign-trail press corps in Rolling Stonemagazine, reporting that he later expanded into hisrevealing and funny book ''The Boys on the Bus.'' Crousedescribed the way a few top journalists like R.W. AppleJr., David S. Broder, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover,through their diligence, ambition and supreme self-confidence, set the agenda for the whole political race.This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaignblogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that thenews agenda was beginning to be set by this largelyunpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers.A few blocks down Eighth Avenue, thousands of journalistswith salaries and health benefits waited for the nextspeech and the next press release from the Republicancampaign. Here in the Tank, Jesse and Ezra sat resting onthe futon with some dumplings. Moulitsas was crashing on afriend's floor for the week. Atrios had just quit his jobas an economics professor, and Armstrong could fondly lookback on stints in his 20's as a traveling Deadhead, aPeace Corps volunteer and a Buddhist monastery dweller.Like almost everyone in the Tank, Moulitsas startedblogging to blow off steam. He seemed as surprised asanyone to find himself on the verge of respectability.------------That week, while Moulitsas blogged with gusto -- posting adoctored photo of Senator Zell Miller with fangs andbloody eyes and the comment, ''Try not to puke,'' stayinglate at the Tank to boo during the televised speeches --Wonkette walked through the hall and saw what shedescribed on her site as the ''Whitest. Convention.Ever.'' She wondered on her blog if anyone had seen anyphotos anywhere of, say, a minority in the house; later,to her relief, someone sent her, and she posted, a fewshots of black and Hispanic people, cleaning the floors.The Wonkette is more fun to read than Daily Kos. She'salso more fun to hang out with. Before we went off to thefabulous party that Americans for Tax Reform were throwingat the New York Yacht Club on Monday night, we had timefor an expensive dinner at a really nice restaurant inSoHo. Wonkette hadn't been anywhere near the Tank, andwhen I told her about the scene there, shelaughed. ''They've got the raw carrots and radishes,'' shesaid, ''and we've got the raw tuna appetizer.'' Thecandlelight reflected off the Champagne bubbles in herglass. ''Other bloggers don't consider me a realblogger,'' she said. ''Kos is the platonic ideal of ablogger: he posts all the time; he interacts with hisreaders.'' She swallowed an oyster and smiled. ''I hateall that.''Ana Marie Cox has peachy cream skin and eyes of a verybright blue, strawberry blond hair and a filthy mind; shelikes to analyze our nation's leaders in their mostprivate, ah, parts. She has been talking this way all herlife. Until January, no one listened. She's the daughterof a six-foot-tall blond Scandinavian goddess and one ofthe bright young men who worked under Robert McNamara inthe Pentagon. Her parents split when she was 12, and shewas shuttled between them, and like most kids who grow upthat way, she made an anthropological study of what'scool. She was a loud, pudgy kid with milk-bottle-thickglasses, and when she finally settled into high school inNebraska, she immediately ran for class president. She wasthrown out of ''gifted and talented'' camp for weaving,drunk, through the girl's bathroom one night, and when shetold me about it, she described it as ''the story of mylife'': the smart girl getting booted out of a place whereshe belonged. She dropped out of a Ph.D. program inhistory at the University of California at Berkeley andfound happiness for a few years at Suck.com, a snarkysocial-commentary Web site from the first Internet heyday.She tried freelancing after that, and then spent fivefrustrating years being fired from or leaving one jobafter another, such well-meaning, highbrow institutions asMother Jones, The American Prospect and The Chronicle ofHigher Education -- plus another place she won't name,where, she says, they chastised her for raising hereyebrows wrong and for sighing too loud in meetings.Finally, last fall, she gave up on journalism. She wasfilling out applications for a master's in social workwhen Nick Denton called.Denton is the world's first blogging entrepreneur. He ownsa bunch of these smart-alecky blogs -- Wonkette; a NewYork City gossip site called Gawker; a Hollywood site,Defamer; and Fleshbot, a porn site. Anytime somebodybuilds a media empire, especially one that includespornography, you assume the money is good, but in theWonkette's case, it isn't. Her starting salary was $18,000a year. (She's getting bonuses now for increased traffic,but not much.) But she likes the fact that Denton hasn'tput a lot of restrictions on her. ''The only thing he saidwas that he wanted it to be funnier than Josh Marshall,''she told me. ''The bar isn't raised too high.''Imagine a fairly drunk housewife stuck in front of CNN,growing hornier as the day wears on. The Wonkette readslike a diary of that day. Cox quickly found her voice --funny, sex-obsessed, self-indulgent. ''The Wonkette islike me after a few margaritas,'' she said. She startedwith two basic themes: questioning Bush's sexualpreference and praising Kerry's anatomical, well, gifts.In March, she discovered a terrific new feature on theBush-Cheney Web site that let voters generate their ownofficial Bush-Cheney '04 posters with personalizedslogans. She dubbed it ''The Sloganator,'' and until thecampaign got wind of her project and shut down theSloganator, Wonkette solicited slogans from readers andprinted up very professional-looking Bush-Cheney posterswith phrases like ''Christians for purification of the MidEast,'' ''Because Satan is coming to eat your kids''and ''Crackers Unite'' emblazoned across the top. Readersloved it. It took Wonkette just three months to reach thetraffic numbers Marshall had been working to build up forthree years.While the Wonkette likes to make fun of Washington'scapacity to take itself seriously, sometimes she seems totake it more seriously than anyone. She spent about amonth out of her mind with excitement on one totallypointless story, the White House Correspondents' Dinner,wondering online if any of her readers might get her in. Afriend finally came through and took her as his date, andthe following morning she posted several very keyed-upreports: ''Arrive with J. in cab to Hinckley Hilton: Omg.There really is a red carpet. Paparazzi. Sort of junior-varsity feeling, but still. Fumble with wrap, bag,umbrella . . . remember . . . don't show teeth in smile,suck in gut, stick out chest. The paparazzi go nuts!Smile, prepare to wave. . . . Realize that we have enteredjust behind Jessica Lynch.'' And then later: ''Morewine. . . . Keep thinking I see Harvey Weinstein, but it'sjust random heavy-set mogulish types. . . . Lights flash.Time for mediocre surf-and-turf! . . . waiter passes withtray of Jell-O shots, and for a brief, beautiful moment,it appears that Wolfowitz might take one.'' She wasfinally getting paid for being drunk at gifted-and-talented camp.Not long after Wonkette came to life, Cox's hometownnewspaper, The Lincoln Journal Star, profiled her. Then anonline crew from The Washington Post came to videotape herblogging, and then bookers started calling from talkshows. By midsummer, she had been on ''ScarboroughCountry,'' on MSNBC, which she likes to call ''Scar-Co,''four times. TV stardom seemed to her to be the ideal nextstep.Sure enough, in July, MTV called and asked her to reportfrom the Democratic National Convention. She was thrilled,and she fixed on the idea that this convention gig mightturn into a real job at the network. Whatever it is thatmakes a person want to be famous, need to be famous -- andnot everything about a ravenous hunger for fame is bad --Cox has that. The carrot of fame now hanging over her wasdistracting, and I got the sense that certain situationswere playing out in her head. ''I watched 'Breakfast atTiffany's' a lot as a kid,'' she said.A couple of weeks before the convention, she flew to LosAngeles for a screen test, and when she got back, she toldme that she had aced it. ''I am very good at this,'' shesaid proudly. She was getting a little obsessed. ''It'sweird,'' she said. ''It's like discovering you can yodel.You know what I mean? I'm good. I really never would'veknown.''In Boston, at the convention, she hardly blogged at all.MTV had scheduled a single short piece for her to do fromthe convention floor. ''I'm not really doing anything forMTV,'' she said at the start of the convention. ''I'mdoing interviews about being hired by MTV.'' A couple ofdays later, I ran into her at the FleetCenter. She was ina hurry. ''I have to go be interviewed by 'Nightline,'''she said. '''Oh, and what do you do?''' she went on,pretending to be Ted Koppel. '''I get interviewed aboutwhat it's like to be the MTV special correspondent. Iforward media requests. I try to find free food andliquor.''' That evening, from my seat up in the raftersnext to Moulitsas, I saw Cox in action down on the floor,holding a microphone, kneeling, interviewing a delegate.It took me a moment to realize that there was nocameraman; it was just Cox, with a microphone and aproducer hovering over her shoulder offering little bitsof advice.I couldn't figure it out. Why was she so excited aboutworking for MTV? MTV is for 9-year-olds. It's so 1992. Itwas as if her sense of what was cool and what was stupid,so unerring on her blog, had abandoned her. How could shethink that 18 seconds with those cocky jerks on ''Scar-Co'' was better than a perfect joke about a president, hisdog and a blown kiss? Four months of setting the blogworld on fire making dirty political jokes suddenly wasn'tenough any more.But then she wasn't asked to cover the Republicanconvention for MTV. It would be fair to say that thisupset her. Wonkette had seemed like the perfect steppingstone to something big. Now she had to consider, What ifWonkette was as good as it gets?By the time we sat down to dinner in New York, she wasemploying that old trick of pretending to be happy withjust this. She was focusing on the blog again and its manyperks. ''I haven't bought my own dinner or drinks inmonths,'' she said. She tipped her head to the side andshrugged. ''That's the best benefit of being Wonkette.That's the sad truth. They all want something. But that'sfine. All I want is dinner and drinks.''In Boston, the day before the convention started and aftera long, glittering night following the Wonkette to fancyparties, I came back late and found Josh Marshall in myhotel room, lying sideways on a cot, blogging. He wasdrinking a Diet Coke, his face illuminated by the glow ofhis laptop, legs crossed, socked feet hanging off theedge. Earlier in the day, when he mentioned that his hotelreservation didn't start until Monday, I had offered toshare my room with him for the night.The first time I had met him, back in April in Washington,he was drinking a large Coke from Chipotle and a foot-talliced coffee. He explained that he spent most afternoons atStarbucks, and then he would head back to his apartment toblog all night, drinking coffee, sometimes even editingand revising while lying in bed. ''You edit something whenyou're literally falling asleep,'' he said. ''It can bekind of scary.''In my room in Boston, he had a little hotel ice bucket byhis side with two more Diet Cokes in it, and he finishedthem off before bedtime. It was late, and I was tired andhe was disoriented, trying to blog under suchcircumstances, but before we turned off the lights hewanted to show me his Talking Points Memo ID, whichresembled a press badge. He wondered if I thought itlooked real. The credentials we would all be receiving thenext day didn't require any press badge, but staffreporters of actual news organizations always seem to haveseparate institutional ID's, thick plastic magnetizeddeals that can open locked doors. Working off the model ofa friend's ID, Marshall had, using his girlfriend'scomputer and photo printer, made a sober little knockoff,including his picture (in coat and tie), an expirationdate and an explanation of company policy: should thecompany's only employee be terminated, the badge wouldbecome the property of Talking Points Memo. He laminatedit at Kinko's. He had also brought his own lanyard (eachmedia empire has its own necklace strings) and his ownlittle plastic badge holder. I told him it lookedcompletely legit.Marshall had been wondering about that for a while. Evenbefore he had finished his Ph.D. in American history atBrown, he was thinking about the impending problem of howto look legit, where to fit in. His father is a professorof marine biology, and Marshall knew, as Cox had known,that academic life wouldn't work. He wanted to be awriter, and he wanted to write about serious stuff, and hewanted to do it with a lot of passion. Marshall's mom haddied when he was still in grade school, in a car accident,and he says losing her made it impossible for him to livewithout believing strongly in something. And he does: heis a guy whose waking state hovers right between irate andincensed, and for him those beliefs require action. Comingout of school, he had a love for history and a handle onAmerican policy issues, and he figured the rest would besimple, job-wise, if only somebody would let him write.Marshall spent three years after his Ph.D. program workingas an editor at The American Prospect, the liberal policyjournal, and I got the feeling -- not so much from him,because he didn't want to talk about it, but from formercolleagues -- that by the time he quit, he had decidedthat it would be better to starve than to work for someoneelse. So for a while he starved.Marshall started the blog in 2000, during the Floridarecount, as a release valve, and it's still working thatway; oversimplifying weighty issues, reducing them totheir essential skeletons, somehow relaxes him. SinceFebruary, with the explosion of blog traffic and theinvention of blog ads as a revenue source, a few elitebloggers have found themselves on the receiving end of aHowitzer of money, as much as $10,000 a month. Marshall isone of them, and now that the release valve has become ajob, albeit a well-paying one, he has to resist thetendency to ruin it. He wrestles with the question of howmany posts are enough, since he's a one-man operation andhis advertisers have paid ahead of time, and then thereare also those obligations to The Hill, where he writes alow-paying weekly column, and The Washington Monthly,another underpaid gig that harks back to his hungrierdays.When I fell asleep in my hotel room, Marshall wascomplaining that there are no good books on the Crusades.The next morning, he got back into his clothes from thenight before. He looked like a wrinkle bomb had hit him.The big news, the only piece of news, it seemed, about theDemocratic convention was that bloggers had beencredentialed as news media, sort of, and after so manymonths ripping the mainstream press coverage of thecampaign, a little tingle hung in the air. How would thenew breed thrive on the ancient media's home turf, a newsevent by and for the big news folks? I spent the day atthe FleetCenter, in the terrific accommodations theDemocrats had arranged for the bloggers: up in thenosebleed seats, Section 320, where 35 of them, the luckyones who had been credentialed, could fight for any of the15 bar stools they had been provided, along with somemakeshift plywood desks built along the railing. Whoevergot there late sat in the cramped, yellow, steeply bankedfolding seats, no elbowroom, bad lighting, their powercords snaking down the rows to a couple of surgeprotectors. Moulitsas was in Section 320, and so wasArmstrong from MyDD, Atrios of Eschaton, Zoe fromGadflyer, Jesse and Ezra, Jeralyn of Talkleft, Dave Pellfrom Electablog, Chris Rabb from Afro-Netizen, Bill Scherfrom Liberal Oasis and Christian Crumlish ofradiofreeblogistan. But no Josh Marshall.I ran into him later on in the press stands, to the rightof the stage, where he had set up shop, squatting at aspot designated for an official news organization in thecoveted blue section. He was fiddling with his computerand finishing a cellphone call about what he called ''thebiggest story of my life,'' one that would quell any fearsabout his legitimacy as a real journalist, at least for awhile. But right now he was just trying to get online.That damned wireless modem he had spent so much money onreally stunk. Verizon was driving him nuts. He had by thispoint changed into a fresh shirt and different pants fromthe ones he had been wearing when he left my hotel room,but he appeared, from head to toe, to be entirely wrinkledagain, as though his clothing wrinkled at a faster ratethan other people's. He gave up on trying to get online,finished his call and sat back. With his arms foldedacross his chest, in an incensed yet somewhat professorialtone, very up-all-night, very corduroy, he talked on andon about Douglas Feith and Ahmed Chalabi and Karl Rove.For the entire time we were in Boston, he never seemedcurious about where the bloggers were supposed to sit, andwhenever I told him I had just come from there -- at onepoint I even called from my cellphone, up in thenosebleeds, and waved -- he never went up to visit. Heskipped the blogger breakfast that morning, and I had todrag him out to go party-hopping at night -- though whenhe got there, look out! (Just kidding.)Marshall often seemed stuck between two worlds. In theblogger world, he was a star, author of one of the mostpopular and most respected sites. But unlike Moulitsas,who consulted on campaigns and helped develop software forpolitical fund-raising and dreamed of marble statues inhis image, Marshall seemed unsure of where blogging wasleading. In the mainstream media world, he was not a majorplayer, not yet anyway. He published occasional, well-regarded magazine pieces -- one in The Atlantic, one inThe New Yorker -- but nothing earth-shattering. He didn'treally seem at home there. Writing for magazines, he said,had become a big pain. Blogging was easier, freer. ''Inblogging,'' Marshall said, ''there's no lead, no 'What'smy point?''' The blog ad money had fallen from the sky,and it had saved him.''Now I'm not under any financial pressure to write,'' hesaid. ''What I backed into, in doing this blog, wasfreedom. And not having to write things I didn't believeand not having to write ways I didn't want to write.'' Itis this unique amount of leeway that has allowed him, overthe past two years, to run at his own pace, dig deeper. Onhis blog, he brings attention to overlooked stories. Hewrote about Valerie Plame's cover being blown eight daysbefore The New York Times did. And a paper put out byscholars at the Kennedy School of Government analyzing thefall of Trent Lott singled out Marshall for keeping thefocus on a story that had otherwise slipped off themainstream-media radar.Like the Wonkette, Marshall loved the idea of being tappedby those who had once ignored him. Over the summer, hepaired up with a big network news show on an investigativestory, hoping some of its credibility would rub off onhim. But then the network bumped the story at the lastminute. If only he could turn his back completely on theold way, concentrate on nothing but the blog; but lettinggo of institutional approval and the security andcamaraderie that goes with it is like jumping out awindow. He can't decide between loving the big media,linking to it, hoping they'll pick up on stories, andhating it, despising it, insulting it, trying to convinceyou, or himself, that it's the worst thing in the worldand that it's ruining American democracy.Marshall did a little more heavy sighing and wrinkledhimself up some more, rubbing his sour face, and launchedinto what was really irking him at this moment. ''Going italone is harder than it looks,'' he said. He had beenfairly aggressively attacking the Swift Boat Veterans forTruth and had attracted plenty of fire himself. ''I'vegotten tons of hate mail over the last few weeks,'' hesaid. ''You get a very thick skin for it. But it's hard.There's something on the karmic level. You feel the levelof hate, and when you get a hundred of those, it'sexhausting. Normally I'm oblivious to it, but lately it'sgetting to me a little.'' He had blocked mail from certaine-mail accounts, and yet, he said, ''even though I haven'tanswered them -- some I haven't answered in a year --they're still writing. This one guy has subject headingslike 'Why you're an idiot today.' Certain people read thesite to counteract their heart medication.''On April Fools' Day, Moulitsas really blew it. In aswaggering reaction to a Daily Kos reader who wondered inthe comment section whether the four American civiliancontractors strung up in Falluja deserved the same respectas American soldiers, he wrote, ''I feel nothing over thedeath of mercenaries,'' and then added, ''Screw them.''Within hours, he became the focus of an internationalletter-writing campaign to drive away all of hisadvertisers. It worked, too. House candidates, Senatecandidates, they all pulled their ads. But in a matter ofweeks brand-new ads came in to fill the void. ''It was ablip!'' Moulitsas told me later, a little triumphantly. Hehad nearly destroyed himself, but not quite.In the aftermath of what was maybe the worst week ofMoulitsas's life, friends asked him if he might notconsider choosing between his two roles, as aclearinghouse for activism and an outlet for information.But the site continued to grow, fund-raising chugged alongfor his candidates, and he wanted me to know that hissurvival was a big finger in the eye of anyone who said ablogger couldn't be two things at once.But there was another role Moulitsas hadn't quite masteredyet: his place in the established machinery of theDemocratic Party. Moulitsas is a rabid Democrat, devotedto the idea of the party, but he also feels a deepdistrust for the party system, and so do many of hisreaders. Moulitsas has always been an outsider. He wasborn in Chicago, but moved to his mother's native ElSalvador at age 4, and as the civil war there heated up inthe 1980's, he remembers stepping over dead bodies. Heonly returned to Chicago after rebel soldiers passed alongphotos of Moulitsas and his brother to the family, aninvitation to leave or lose their sons. Moulitsas speaksof himself, at the time of his return to Chicago when hewas 9, as a tiny geek with a big mouth who couldn't speakEnglish and who quickly learned to say things to bullies,in his heavy Spanish accent, that were just confoundingenough for him to make a getaway before the bully realizedhe had been insulted. In high school, his Americanexperience didn't improve. ''I had to eat fast and run tothe library to read, because I didn't have any friends,''he said. After graduation, at 17, he enlisted in the U.S.Army. He was 5 foot 6 and weighed 110 pounds. Likeeveryone else, he carried a 65-pound pack on those 15- and20-mile marches. He had been pushed around all his life,but in basic training, within spitting distance of hisdrill sergeants, he learned to fight back.In Boston, I went with Moulitsas to a really swanky partygiven in honor of the bloggers at a Middle Easternrestaurant on the Charles River. At 2 a.m., as people werefiling out to leave, a discussion that had started onlinespilled onto the middle of the floor. For the last fewweeks, Moulitsas had been conversing on at least twodifferent blogs with Jim Bonham, the executive director ofthe Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. TheD.C.C.C. is the arm of the Democratic Party that providesmoney, expert advice and technical support to candidatesin close House races, and Moulitsas had been complainingthat the group was abandoning some viable candidates,especially liberal ones, and leaving them to ''flailaround.'' Moulitsas became especially worked up about aCongressional candidate in Pennsylvania named GinnySchrader. Her race against an incumbent Republican lookedunwinnable, until her opponent suddenly dropped out of therace. Moulitsas immediately started soliciting donationsfor Schrader on Daily Kos, and within a couple of days hehad raised $40,000 for her campaign, which the day beforehad had $7,000 in the bank. The D.C.C.C. was slower toreact, and Moulitsas felt outraged and free to take awhack or two at them.So when Moulitsas and Bonham met by the door at the party,they started screaming at each other. People gatheredaround to watch, blocking the crowd attempting to leave.Jim Bonham is taller and stouter than Moulitsas, butJerome Armstrong of MyDD stood behind Moulitsas, kind ofgrinning and shaking his head. Stirling Newberry, ablogger buddy of Moulitsas's from the Draft Clarkmovement, tried to act as peacemaker, but it didn't work.Nicco Mele, the official liaison between the D.C.C.C. andthe blogosphere, just stood back, horrified.When I reached the blogger section the next day, Moulitsaswas still pumped up. ''Did you see my epic battle?'' heyelled over to me. Armstrong turned around, grinning hishead off. ''The D.C.C.C. has never been challenged,''Moulitsas said when I got over to his seat. ''It was ashot across the bow.'' Then he re-enacted the fight. ''Youshould've heard him yelling: 'So you can raise $20,000,but I can raise $2 million! You have to understand yourrole in this!'''Armstrong said, ''I'd have hit him if he said that tome.''Moulitsas said: ''I told him: 'Don't yell at me. The rulesare changing. You gotta adapt. You gotta wake up andrealize your role.''' (I talked to Bonham later, and hesaid he didn't get why Moulitsas thought the D.C.C.C. wasslighting bloggers. After all, Bonham said, the D.C.C.C.had paid for the very top-drawer blogger bash where thefight broke out.)For Moulitsas and for a lot of other people new topolitics in 2004 -- amateurs who liked the thrill rideDean had taken them on -- the idea that the rules hadchanged seemed entirely obvious. What was important tothese new activists, he told me, was winning -- winningthe presidency, winning back the Senate, winning as manyCongressional seats as possible. Soon after we met,Moulitsas tried to convince me how important it was forthe old guard to start seeing politics through the eyes ofthe bloggers. That meant rapid response, he said, smartuse of technology, constant two-way communication with thevoters and grass-roots fund-raising. He told me the storyof a flash advertisement that the D.N.C. had posted on itsWeb site. Moulitsas hated it. ''It was horrible, the worstthing I'd ever seen,'' he said. ''So I blogged a postsaying, 'That's the biggest piece of garbage I've everseen in my whole entire life''' (although he used strongerlanguage than that). ''What the hell were they thinking?''he asked. ''I was embarrassed to be a Democrat. So then Iget phone calls and e-mails, 'Well, why didn't you talk tous?' I'm like: 'What's there to talk about? The thing's apiece of garbage.' And then they say: 'It was done by avolunteer. If you attack them, then volunteers aren'tgoing to want to do stuff like that.' I'mlike: 'Good! 'Cause it's a piece of garbage.' I'm like,Here's the way it goes. O.K., from now on, keep this inmind: whenever you put up anything on this site, think,How are the blogs going to react?'' He was smiling, butall the veins were pulsing in his neck. ''You can pout allyou want,'' he said, ''but I'm not here to make friendswith you guys and go to your little cocktail parties. Andthat piece of garbage is going to lose us votes.''Although the D.C.C.C. raises a lot more money forCongressional candidates than Moulitsas does, candidateshave caught on to the fact that Moulitsas's help can beinvaluable. While we were sitting up there in the bloggernosebleed section, his phone rang. It was Samara Barend, ayoung community activist running for Congress in upstateNew York. When Moulitsas hung up, he told me she wascalling ''either to get my endorsement or to get me towrite about the race.''Then we headed to the Westin to meet another Congressionalcandidate hoping for some of the same attention from DailyKos: Diane Farrell, a selectwoman from Westport, Conn. Wesat down in the hotel's ornate lobby, where delegates andjournalists were checking e-mail and chatting. After somefriendly introductions, Farrell made her pitch. ''Theproblem is that we don't have a TV station,'' shesaid. ''We have three daily papers, but direct mail willprobably be our biggest expense. Radio costs too much.''Moulitsas said, ''Are you doing the heavy ground game?''''Oh, most definitely.''Moulitsas wondered if the remnants of the Dean movementcould help out. ''Are there any Dean organizations aroundyou?'' he asked.''Bean?''Moulitsas cleared his throat. ''Dean.''''Oh, yes,'' she said.Later, Moulitsas decided to add Barend -- but not Farrell -- to the short list of candidates he deemed most worthbacking and raised more than $10,000 for her campaign.Moulitsas's ''friendly relations'' with particularcandidates got him into a public fight with ZephyrTeachout, who became briefly famous last winter as theguru of the Dean Internet campaign, which in fact employedMoulitsas for several months. Over the summer, shecomplained in several online forums, and to Moulitsasdirectly, that he and other bloggers were blurring thelines between editorial and advertising, lines that hadalways been sacred in journalism. According to Teachout,they were posting comments in support of candidates forwhom they were also working as paid consultants and notexplaining that conflict of interest, or at least notfully enough for Teachout. In an online discussion withJay Rosen, who heads the journalism department at N.Y.U.,she wrote, ''I think where we essentially disagree is thattransparency alone is enough.''''Zephyr can go to hell,'' Moulitsas said at theDemocratic convention. ''I'm not about to censor myself onany issue,'' he later wrote on another Web site. ''If Icare about something, I'll write about it. It's theessence of blogging. As for the mainstream media, whocares what some joker journalism professor wrote? Justkeep blogging, doing your thing, and the blogosphere willcontinue to do just fine. We should let ouraccomplishments speak for themselves, and they will.''For Moulitsas, the bigger problem these days is his ownsuccess. When we met up again at the Republicanconvention, we walked around ground zero, and he told meabout his rising page views. ''I was losing sleep over howI'd survive the traffic,'' he said. His daily readershiphad surpassed 350,000, and by most counts he had becomethe most-read political blogger in the country. He told mehe had hired a full-time programmer to take over thetechnical work of running his site. ''I never intended tobe here,'' he said. ''Nothing foreshadowed the attentionDaily Kos is getting.''Moulitsas said that people had been coming in fromBrooklyn and other places just to shake his hand, becausethey knew he would be at the Tank. ''It's weird,'' hesaid. ''It makes me uncomfortable. People who achieve acertain amount of celebrity plan it. They expect thatpublic attention will be part of the package.''Away from the Tank now, he could relax for a moment andreflect. ''I'm really self-conscious of how the bloggercommunity perceives me,'' he said. ''I feel guilty that Idon't link to more bloggers, I feel guilty that I'm moresuccessful than other bloggers. I feel guilty that I makeas much money as I do now, that I get more traffic. Ratherthan enjoy it, sometimes I feel really guilty about it.It's silly.''As we neared Wall Street, Moulitsas said: ''The otherangst I have about blogging is that because I depend onthe income, it has become a job. You'd think I'd be happy.I make a living off of blogging! But it's interesting how,once it becomes a job, there's a certain angst that I'mkind of afflicted with. I can't quit.''When the bloggers first arrived in Boston for theDemocratic convention, some of them had high hopes forwhat they would be able to accomplish there -- thattogether they would cough up an astounding Rashomoncollective of impressions and insights, interlinked, withempowering conclusions. With their new form of journalism,at once smaller and larger than the mainstream, theyplanned to bring politics back to the people. But thosefirst few posts, so highly anticipated by their fellowbloggers, the ones who didn't score credentials, were moreabout the bus ride from the hotel, the heavy security inthe parking lot; their seats in the rafters were terrible,they had trouble getting floor passes and, anyway, out onthe floor, who would they talk to? Were they supposed topretend to be regular reporters? Up in the nosebleeds, thedelegates overran their special section, and it got so hotat night you could die, especially with a nice warm laptopbaking your thighs; the WiFi kept fading, cutting them offfrom the world, from their Googling and pondering; from upin the cheap seats, the stage was minuscule, the speakers'faces were dots, the sound didn't travel. The only thingthe bloggers really had the inside scoop on were theballoons hanging a few feet away from them in the rafters,in huge sacks of netting.The bloggers had spent this year hammering the mainstreammedia for failing to tell the ''real story'' of HowardDean or John Kerry or George W. Bush. And they hammered atthe campaigns, too, for failing to make their messageclear, for failing to adapt to surprises on the road, inthe glare of all that attention. But now they were findingthe campaign trail could be rough. Zephyr Teachout satdown next to me on the night of Kerry's speech and startedneedling the bloggers. ''Look how hard it is to work whenthe conditions are awful, when you're star struck, whenit's hard to find anecdotes that are good,'' she said.And as a seasoned reporter myself -- after two wholeconventions -- I can safely say that you get about as manyinsights into the hearts and souls of the candidates onthe campaign trail as you would watching a plastic ferngrow. The ever-increasing scrutiny of candidates becauseof cable and the Internet has only made more evident howimpregnable and unfathomable our political machinery hasbecome. Political reporters hanging around drinking andsmoking at the conventions said that the bus had changed alot since 1972. You spend all day watching nothing, fakedeli-counter photo ops with six camera crews, and you getyelled at if you walk into the camera shot -- that is, ifyou dare to go near the guy you're covering.The news media helped create the modern campaign, and nowthey seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast,adapted quickly. By the time the Republican conventionrolled around in August, they had figured something out,staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison SquareGarden. They had begun to work the way news people do atmanufactured news events, by sticking together, sharinginformation, repeating one another's best lines. They werelearning their limitations, and at the same time they weredigging around and critiquing and fact-checking andraising money. They still liked posting dirty jokes andgoofy Photoshopped pictures of politicians, but they hadhope, and more than a few new ideas, and they weredetermined to make themselves heard.Matthew Klam, a contributing writer for the magazine whohas previously written about ecstasy and the world of daytraders, is the author of ''Sam the Cat and OtherStories.''Copyright 2004 The New York Times Companyhttp://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html