The War's Left Front

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.