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July 3-10, 2006 issue - Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is sitting on his back porch in Berkeley, Calif., listening to the hummingbirds and explaining his plans to seize control of the Democratic Party. It is one week after YearlyKos, the Las Vegas conference of progressives that Moulitsas sponsored and promoted heavily on his popular liberal blog, DailyKos.com. Every major media outlet in the country had attended the conference, detailing the spectacle of Democratic bigwigs (including the party's Senate minority leader and four of its leading 2008 presidential aspirants) embracing Moulitsas as the guru of an activist movement they were eager to exploit. With the conference, Moulitsas says, his movement had finally proved its relevance to the party. "We're not sitting around waiting for the so-called professionals to give us power in the party," he tells NEWSWEEK. "We're taking it for ourselves."

It seems as though the rock-thrower is growing up. Inside, a handyman is remodeling the Moulitsases' suburban living room, where soon the futon will be replaced by a daybed, and the big, boxy television by a sleek new flat-panel. If YearlyKos—where he was quizzed by the likes of Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert on what the Democrats ought to do to win—proved anything, it was that Moulitsas had forced his way into the upper echelons of party strategists. Moulitsas sees his new status as the start of a natural progression: "We said we wanted to crash the gates. We never said we weren't going to come in."

But a place in the inner sanctum comes with its challenges—and Kos picked a rough time to join. Last week the GOP rallied around Karl Rove's "cut and run" battle cry and went on the offensive against a Democratic Party that was all over the place on the war. Sen. John Kerry was constantly on cable TV, touting an amendment requiring the redeployment of troops out of Iraq by July 2007; most members of his own party voted against it. The party had better discipline on a more gradual pullout measure backed by Sens. Carl Levin and Jack Reed, voting together, coordinating talking points—and still going down to a sound defeat. The GOP was clearly on the rebound. "They're buoyed by Zarqawi's death and other steps in Iraq, but they're also strengthened by the disarray of the Democrats," says one senior Bush aide, who asked not to be identified speaking about political strategy.

Democrats tried to downplay the significance of the GOP's momentum. "What this indicates is the White House is much better at sloganeering than they are at actually governing and conducting this war," former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards told NEWSWEEK.

Still, the Democrats lost the week in the war over the war, and Moulitsas—who chats with Senate leadership aides several times a week and has brainstormed with Democratic operatives about the fall campaign—could no longer just criticize from the outside. Indeed, the Democrats' failed Iraq strategy—stand together, talk tough and make plans to leave—lined up exactly with the prescriptions found on Daily Kos.

Moulitsas is also learning another downside of membership in the elite: the bigger the liberal sniper gets, the more incoming fire he faces. The talk of the blogosphere last week was "Kosola"—allegations that Moulitsas wrote favorably about candidates with whom he or his close friend and coauthor Jerome Armstrong had financial relationships. Moulitsas swore the charges were baseless (Armstrong, too, has denied impropriety), but they clearly got under his skin. When The New Republic's Web site published an e-mail from Moulitsas to a group of friendly activists urging them not to talk about Kosola and thus "starve it of oxygen," Moulitsas went berserk in a blog posting, accusing the venerable liberal journal of treason. By the weekend, Moulitsas's allies were sending each other e-mails infected with the paranoia of revolutionaries who've gained power too fast: How should they deal with traitors? How much openness could they handle? Which fellow travelers could they really trust?

The best balm for his new headaches, of course, is victory. Moulitsas is aggressively talking up the party's challengers in Senate races in Virginia, Montana, Ohio and Nevada. As in 2003, when he rose to prominence filling Howard Dean's Internet piggy bank, he's funneling followers to sites where they can give money to candidates online; only now he has several hundred thousand more readers to hit up and a better network of informants in battleground states. At the same time, he's taken on the task of party-loyalty enforcer, backing candidates who wear their partisanship proudly and assailing those who seem too cozy with the other side on a range of issues. The best test of his new power: Sen. Joe Lieberman, an old Moulitsas nemesis who stands a good chance of losing his August primary thanks to heavy blogger backing of his opponent, Ned Lamont. Moulitsas's success in that race, and a handful of other contests that may well turn on the politics of the war, will help determine if he's just the latest in a series of faddish Internet phenomena (remember MoveOn.org?) or the future of the Democratic Party he so longs to be.

It was the Iraq war that got Moulitsas to log on in the first place. He started blogging in 2002, largely out of frustration at how little the mainstream media were criticizing the Bush administration's apparent rush to invade Iraq. "It was a time that was very stifling for liberal voices in the American landscape," he remembers. "No one could criticize the president because it was considered treasonous to criticize the president in time of war." But as an Army veteran who served in artillery logistics in the first gulf war, he felt he could question the rush to combat with impunity. "I vowed my life for the right to criticize our leaders. Nobody was going to tell me I could or could not criticize anybody."

As public support for the war began to slip, Democratic leaders began turning to him for help. Dean hired him. And after John Kerry's defeat in 2004, party leadership invited him to speak to Senate Democrats about how they could better use the Internet as a fund-raising tool.

By 2006, Daily Kos was drawing some 600,000 hits a day, and Moulitsas's anger over the war—and the Dems' failure to hold Bush accountable—had reached a fever pitch. Yet some Dems fear that Moulitsas's popularity will pull the party so far to the left that it won't be able to win the general election in 2008. "It's a little bit like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' with these guys," said an aide to a Democratic presidential candidate who asked not to be identified while the boss was angling for Moulitsas's support. "You like what they're saying when they're coming in, but you don't know what they're going to do once you let them into your house." Newt Gingrich, who wins points even from liberal bloggers for his political acumen, marvels at the Democrats' embrace of the blogosphere: "Candidates out there run a risk of resembling the people they're trying to appeal to," he tells NEWSWEEK. "I think the Republican Party has few allies more effective than the Daily Kos."

Moulitsas will try to earn his stripes in the Aug. 8 Connecticut primary, where he and other bloggers have hammered Lieberman for his embrace of the Bush doctrine on Iraq. "If it were not for my position on the war in Iraq," Lieberman tells NEWSWEEK, "I don't believe there would be a primary against me." Moulitsas is doing everything he can to make that primary fatal for Lieberman—rallying other bloggers, ginning up money and making Lamont the poster child for the "people-powered movement."

Moulitsas's targeting of Lieberman angers some Democrats, who argue that at a time when the party faces tough odds of taking back the Senate, there are better targets than a popular incumbent. But in other races, Moulitsas has put pragmatism above his ideology. When Iraq veteran Paul Hackett was facing Sherrod Brown in Ohio's Democratic senatorial primary, Moulitsas initially backed Hackett. "Give me an Iraq vet over a career politician," he blogged. But as the contest wore on and Democratic leaders spread the word that Brown would be a stronger general-election candidate, Moulitsas changed allegiance. (Hackett eventually withdrew from the race). Brown's candidacy is now obsessively promoted on Daily Kos—along with other candidates who take a variety of different positions on the war.

The pressure on Moulitsas—to be consistent, to be pragmatic, to win—will only grow as the fall elections approach. Already, the strain of the spotlight is beginning to show in his growing belligerence and paranoia. When Kosola broke, Moulitsas e-mailed fellow progressive activists, wondering who might be shopping the story. "I've gotten reliable tips that Hillary's operation has been digging around my past (something I confronted them about, btw, and never got a denial), and you know the Lieberman/DLC/TNR camp is digging as well," he wrote, referring to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and The New Republic. (Aides to Senators Clinton and Lieberman deny the allegations in the e-mails.)

Back on the porch in Berkeley, Moulitsas shows he's learned at least one key trick of being an insider: setting low expectations. "We're going to lose a lot of races this year and a lot of races in '08," he says. "The goals of this movement are long term." Still, he knows that superstardom comes with a time limit. "I'm the flavor of the month; it could be someone else in five months or a year." To avoid an early flameout, he's "going dark" for two to three months so he can focus on his "real work, which is talking about these races and issues." He pauses for a moment, thinking over the implications of what he's just said. "Well, there are always exceptions ... I'd make an exception for Jon Stewart." He pauses again so as not to talk over the handyman's high-powered vacuum. "The reality is I can't go under the radar. There's a point of no return."

With Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey and Debra Rosenberg in Washington, and Lee Hudson Teslik in New York