Kos call: for America's number one liberal blogger, politics is like sports: it's all about winning.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin
• Position: DailyKos - Markos Moulitsas Zuniga - Biography

"I hate Washington," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Many people, of course, say that they hate Washington. Jay Leno says so. So do Rush Limbaugh and Monica Lewinsky. 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. When Moulitsas says Washington he's not talking about Bush's Washington, with it's pitched partisan camps and and pay-to-play ethos. 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. To him, it's not that these people have the wrong values, or priorities. It's that they are failures. Moulitsas's career to this point has been a bet that enough other people sham this very precise, nearly sub-articulate animus. I hate Washington.

And yet there he was, just after the 2004 elections, in the ornate Lyndon B. Johnson room of the capitol, where he'd been invited to give Senate Democrats a post mortem on what went wrong. The party had just lost its third election in a row, and his audience, a self-flagellatory group at the best of rimes, was feeling glum and a little bit desperate. Moulitsas told the assembled crowd that they, the establishment, had mismanaged party strategy for too long and that he, Markos, had a better plan. He 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. 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. "I'm not sure everyone really knew what to think," one Senate aide told me.

Moulitsas's appearance before the Democratic caucus was a verbal version of what he writes every day on his blog, DailyKos. The site, which has existed for only around three and a half years, now has 3.7 million readers each week. 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. 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. 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.

This record, combined with the sheer vigor and clarity of his online manifestoes, 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. Every third week, Moulitsas has a standing phone call with congressional powerbroker Rep. Rahm Emmanud (D-Ill) and he talks regularly with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). In part, this is raw flattery, a way for Democratic politicians to keep a particularly shrill irritant off their own backs while simultaneously reaching out to his audience, the party's young, liberal, professional grassroots. But it's not just an empty gesture. Moulitsas has become so well incorporated into the party machinery that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) uses him to recruit candidates. "They get calls from, like John Edwards, and maybe Tom Vilsack, and then, always, Markos," one DCCC staffer told me. This legacy has made him the current champion of that wing of Democratic party--anti-war, deeply partisan, young, mostly white, and professional--that seemed ascendent in the year before the first Democratic primaries in 2004. Deanism, in Moulitsas' hands, in an unending belief in the triumphal capacities of the right kind of theatrics, the importance not just of saying the right things, but of saying them with an uncompromising zeal, and gut, and feeling.

This kind of access would not have been possible in a different political moment. But long, uninterrupted strings of losses tend to break down the old hierarchies and democratize things. The Myth of Karl Rove, which looms over American politics, and the conviction that the party's wins or losses are a matter of tactics, not substance, has left the Democrats looking for their own master tactician. And some in the party seem to want to see Moulitsas in that role.

The conventional wisdom is that a Democratic party in which Moulitsas calls the shots would cater to every whim of its liberal base. But though he can match Michael Moore for shrillness, the most salient thing about Moulitsas' politics is not where he falls on the left-right spectrum (he's actually not very far left). It's his relentless competitiveness, founded not on any particular set of political principles, but on an obsession with tactics--and in particular, with the tactics of a besieged minority, struggling for survival: stand up for your principles, stay united, and never back down from a fight. "They want to make me into the latest Jesse Jackson, but I'm not ideological at all," Moulitsas told me, "I'm just all about winning."

Some influential Democrats believe this new mindset has been largely responsible for many of the party's recent successes in Washington--fighting off the White House's Social Security privatization plan, closing down the Senate to force an investigation into pre-war intelligence, and defeating an attempt by the White House to suspend labor laws in the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast. "These Democratic insiders believe that Moulitsas and his website, who helped egg the party on in this toughened moment, might be transformative, and they want to place a gaudy bet on him.

They also believe, even more strongly, that Moulitsas is transformative, that he contains the trigger for a new political epoch. The DCCC's executive director, John Lapp, says that Moulitsas's model is "a signal event in political history, like the Kennedy-Nixon debates, in how...