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Markos Moulitsas Profile, October 4, 2006
Start the Revolution Without Him
He runs Daily Kos, the wildly influential liberal blog. But Markos Moulitsas says he's no political leader. Now he wants you to argue about another great American pastime: baseball.
Wired Magazine
By Ana Marie Cox
October 2006"I AM WISE TO YOUR SNARKY WAYS." Superstar blogger Markos Moulitsas won't let me near his house. Instead, he meets me at a Berkeley coffee shop. "When the Newsweek guy was there, he saw some workmen putting in my new plasma television and said something about it in the article." He has other examples: the Nightline crew who mocked him for wanting to buy a new piano, the writer for Time – OK, that was me – who called him "bug-eyed." As the founder and proprietor of Daily Kos, the nation's most prominent political blog, Moulitsas has been the subject of intense media scrutiny for the past two years, and it's made him touchy.
Like in Washington, DC, last June. At the annual meeting of the New Democrat Network – a group of moderate, tech-savvy progressives – Moulitsas had a bit of a meltdown. "It's been an interesting week," he said when it was his turn to speak. "Now I'm not being attacked for what I've said and done, but people are inventing things."
Wha-huh? He seemed to be talking about a minor blogosphere scandal involving him and Jerome Armstrong, with whom he wrote the book Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. And then he launched into the theys.
"There are people who don't want to see things change, because they're not used to things changing," he warns. "They can take me down. They can take Jerome Armstrong down. They can take down any of the so-called leaders of the movement. Because everyone who's a part of the movement is a leader."
Later, I tell Moulitsas that he sounded sort of noble, but also sort of like Ross Perot dropping out of a presidential race because of "threats." "They're the ones attacking me. I'm just minding my own business," he says, then cackles. "Oh, that's a lie. But Ross Perot was whining about it. I'm not."
He doesn't have much to whine about. With 3.5 million unique visitors every week, his blog has become the preeminent site for liberals on the Web. It's also a virtual political action committee. Daily Kos raised more than $1 million for Democratic candidates in 2004. Senate minority leader Harry Reid was a keynote speaker for the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas last June, and potential 2008 presidential candidate Mark Warner feted attendees with a $50,000 gala at the Stratosphere Casino. When John Kerry and Barack Obama wanted a line to the blogosphere's most reliable partisans, they posted on Kos.
Daily Kos works because it's not a one-way broadcast of Moulitsas' views. Close to 99 percent of the site is user-generated – it hosts 14,000 comments a day and 2,000 miniblogs called diaries. Moulitsas has figured out how to turn readers into writers, to transform discontent into content.
An activist who has succeeded in mobilizing so many passionate users might next head for a career inside the political machine. Run for office. Start a PAC. Become a consultant. But no. At what's arguably the top of his game, Moulitsas says he's "going offline" next year, taking his obvious knack for building online communities and applying it to that other great American pastime: sports. And once he gets his network of sports blogs ramped up, he'll turn to building communities in the real world, a chain of giant meeting places "replicating megachurches for the left" – complete with cafés and child care. Moulitsas has shown he can harness people's enthusiasm, but he says he doesn't want a leadership role in these "democracy centers."
BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in El Salvador, Moulitsas is compact and combative – a smallish smart-ass. His three years in the US Army as a fire direction specialist filled his language with blood and guts, all "throwing bombs" and "laying waste."
Like so many others, Moulitsas went to the Bay Area in 1999 "to make dotcom millions." His timing was off; he missed the heady days of free-flowing VC funding and instant IPOs. The Latino Web portal he had gone to work for closed after seven months. So, a lifelong politics junkie, he started Daily Kos to fill what he saw as a void. "Every other political Web site I'd been a part of eventually imploded because the comments got out of hand," he says. "I wanted to create the premier online progressive hangout."
Moulitsas speaks in violent rushes, whole paragraphs at a time that often turn in on themselves as he backtracks, revises, catches up with a new thought, or interrupts himself. He's a nightmare to interview, editing himself constantly, word-processing rather than talking. But that's cool – the key to Daily Kos' success lies not with him but with the mix of passion, conspiracy theories, and humor sold under the Daily Kos brand. "I'd be a middling blogger if I focused on my writing," he admits.
Instead, he focuses on being a host – sometimes a cruise director, sometimes a bouncer. "I'm ruthless," Moulitsas says. At first, that meant going through the comments himself, deleting pointless threads and banishing flame warriors. Now Daily Kos runs on Scoop software, which automates that process – "trusted users" rate comments before they're seen by the community as a whole. Moulitsas doesn't try to ignite passions that do not exist. Rather, he provides an outlet for those who are already passionate. "People want to be heard," he says. "People really think they have something to say."
Of course, sometimes people are wrong. In the blog world, he's known more for being outrageous than incisive. He once commented that he felt "nothing" for military contractors killed in Iraq, driving the point home with a terse "screw them." Moulitsas claims such explosive rhetoric is all part of the plan, since it brands the site with a certain attitude and generates media coverage. "I see Daily Kos as a product, not my soapbox."
And the product is selling well. A survey on the site found that Daily Kos readers were well educated and affluent, older than you might think, and immensely loyal. The average visitor spends only a few seconds reading the front page, but spikes of more than 1.1 million visitors in a single day aren't unusual. To have access to those eyeballs, advertisers pay up to $14,000 a month. Moulitsas says he's on track to make $600,000 in revenue this year, and his expenses don't go much beyond programming and $7,000 a month for servers and bandwidth.
"It works," says Glenn Reynolds, the law professor behind competing A-list blog Instapundit.com, "because the secret to getting ahead in the 21st century is capitalizing on people doing what they want to do, rather than trying to get them to do what you want to do."
IN 2004, MOULITSAS toyed with the idea of starting another political site under a different name. "I wanted to see if I could re-create the success without people knowing it was me," he says. He felt like he'd found the playbook for making an online community work, but he wasn't sure. "Was I a historical accident, or did I have some kind of formula?"
That got him thinking about the formula itself. One element was partisanship, certainly, but another ingredient, he suspected, was loneliness – like what he felt when he started Kos. It reminded him of how homesick he felt as a Chicago Cubs fan in the Bay Area.
Hmmm. Moulitsas recruited a friend, Tyler Bleszinski, to start a blog about the Oakland A's with the same blazing passion as Daily Kos. "Tyler was my proxy," he says. Athletics Nation took off, and soon Moulitsas and his pal were launching sites for other teams – the Cubs, the Yankees, even fantasy league teams – under the banner SportsBlogs Nation. Today, the homepage averages 3 million visitors a month, about 20 percent as much traffic as Daily Kos.
Reader comments comprise the bulk of the content, just as they do at Kos, but the forums aren't nearly as raucous. No one calls for the abolition of Israel or the impeachment of George W. Bush; politics is the only prohibited topic. Another difference: human interaction. Fans gather for games, and in the Bay Area the A's treat them like VIPs. Not only does legendary general manager Billy Beane actually post to Athletics Nation, he has given fellow bloggers credit for helping to shape his thoughts.
Moulitsas says his goal for Daily Kos is to reenergize the progressive movement, but the mission of SportsBlogs Nation is to make lots and lots of money. Someday. Last year, Moulitsas and Bleszinski considered looking for venture funding. They talked to multimedia mogul Mark Cuban and San Diego Padres executive Paul DePodesta, but nothing came of it. No problem, says Bleszinski. The site now gets enough traffic that it'll soon support itself with advertising. "That doesn't mean we won't take VC funding at some point, but we're not aggressively seeking it," Bleszinski says.
MOULITSAS MIGHT HAVE made a quiet segue to sports blogs and secular megachurches. But in August, something remarkable happened: Ned Lamont, a former town selectman from Greenwich, Connecticut, defeated US senator Joe Lieberman in that state's Democratic primary. Lamont had been nearly unknown until liberal bloggers, led by Moulitsas, extolled Lamont for opposing the war in Iraq. Daily Kos made Lamont the conduit of antiwar, anti-Bush rage. Whether or not Lamont ever becomes a senator, his victory sealed the perception that Moulitsas is a leader of the new generation of "netroots" political operatives.
He's conflicted about the job. "I'm kind of at the top of my game right now," he says. "But I have no desire to be the face of the Democratic party. I think there are better spokespeople out there."
Indeed, for someone as written-about as Moulitsas, he's a lousy frontman. There's the paranoia and the ranting, of course. And he can seem uninterested in the details. The day after Lamont's win, Moulitsas came to lunch in a Lamont T-shirt. But he fumbled when a woman walked over to our table, pointed at his shirt, and said, "Can you tell me anything about that guy other than he's antiwar?" He couldn't.
At that meeting of the New Democrat Network in DC, Moulitsas freely introduced his "media trainer," Joel Silberman. Now, the first rule of media training is: Nobody talks about media training. But the second rule of media training is: Once you are trained, talk to the media. During that critical Connecticut primary, Moulitsas announced a news blackout. To be fair, he insists that his cavalier attitude toward the press is a sign that he is, well, cavalier about the press. "Do you know how many interviews I turned down today?" Moulitsas asks. "ABC, NBC, Charlie Rose, McLaughlin Group, not to mention a bunch of radio. If I were into self-promotion, I would have said yes to all of them. I never resort to self-promotion. If you have a good product, people will come back."
Moulitsas certainly has the freedom to spout off wonkishly when he feels like it. But honestly, he'd rather run comment boards than pontificate. "It's scary to me that I could be the guy who gives advice, and someone takes it and flops," he says.
Yet the world does seem ready for someone like Moulitsas. Lamont won. President Bush's poll numbers are in the toilet. The Republican National Committee has started issuing talking points attacking him, calling him a "nutroot" who lets liberals "promote their own extreme messages and ideologies." If you can judge a man by his enemies, that's a sure sign that Moulitsas has arrived.
And yet he's leaving. While working on the mechanics of the sports blogs, he plans to embark next year on building real-world destinations for progressives and liberals throughout the Midwest, "cultural outposts" designed to attract thousands of like-minded liberals. "Each one of these would have a vast left-wing conspiracy component," he says, like leadership training or discussions on progressive issues. It's big talk, even for a guy with an uncanny talent for bringing lonely, passionate people together online. The real world will be more challenging.