Sorry for the Nazi title. I saw this article at Romenesko, a widely read blog for old school (mostly print) journalists. I'm a regular dKos participant who posted a first comment late in September, which means I've been here longer than about half of you.
The article, by Kara Platoni, comes from eastbayexpress.com, originally published by East Bay Express on Dec 15, 2004, and is ©2004 New Times, Inc.
Teaser subhead:
Berkeley blogger Markos Moulitsas wants nothing less than to reinvent party politics.
It's a comprehensive (and laudatory) history of the dKos site. I'm posting it as a diary, and I recommend that we all recommend it, but please save any "4's" for diarists who deserve them, I'm just passing this along.
If it's been posted previously my bad, I wish I'd been able to read it back in August when I first visited the site. I happen to think dKos is the best thing since fried okra, but any of you who enjoy suggesting alternative structures should feel free to comment and I'll argue with you.
Okay, just to get some juices percolating, a few quotes from the article's early graphs:
When Dick Cheney claimed during the vice-presidential debate that he had not met Senator John Edwards until that evening, a Daily Kos reader unearthed TV footage of the two men together at a 2001 prayer breakfast. Before the debate was even over, the image had been posted on the Daily Kos Web site and disseminated by the Kerry campaign.
Then there was the moment when a Daily Kos reader realized that a Bush ad showing the president speaking to an audience of soldiers had been altered to make it appear that the crowd was full of military personnel. The Bush campaign had to apologize.
And when the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced it would preempt normal television programming to air the anti-Kerry hit piece Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal, it was on Daily Kos that outraged readers first organized a boycott of Sinclair's advertisers. The company's stock began to tank, investors complained, and Sinclair ultimately was forced to air a more balanced program instead.
dKos now has more than 35,000 registered users, including a dozen or two who have formed their own VRWC wing. I think it's important for those of us who appreciate the dKos community and (almost all of) its members' principles to know an orthodox version of its history.
Here's another clip:
Perhaps the candidacy most emblematic of this new type of political power was that of rookie congressional candidate Jeff Seemann. In April, Moulitsas made a gaffe that accidentally linked his fortunes to those of Seemann. In writing a post about the four civilian contractors who had been brutally killed in Fallujah on March 31, his emotions overshot his sense of diplomacy. "I feel nothing over the death of mercenaries," he wrote. "Screw them."
The response from the political establishment was immediate. The Kerry campaign delinked from his site. Conservative blogs denounced him as a hatemonger and pressed Democratic candidates who advertised on Daily Kos to withdraw their support. Three of them pulled their ads. Daily Kos readers began to worry that the Web site was toast.
Enter longtime blog reader, Daily Kos regular, and long-shot congressional candidate Seemann, who became the first candidate to place a new ad after the pullout. At that moment, things didn't look too bright for Seemann's candidacy. He was an ordinary guy from Canton, Ohio, who had dropped out of college and worked as a disc jockey, sportswriter, and music researcher for Clear Channel Communications. His entry into public life followed an accidental fall that shattered his elbow and taught him that his insurance wouldn't fully cover his medical bills.
When the cost of medical care forced Seemann into bankruptcy, he had a revelation about the shoddy state of American health care. Something needed to be done, he decided, so he ran for the House of Representatives from Ohio's sixteenth Congressional District. Given that the Republican incumbent, Ralph Regula, had held the district for 32 years, the Democratic Party wasn't even planning to run anyone for the seat. Regula's last two challengers hadn't even raised the $5,000 necessary to file initial Federal Elections Commission reports.
But once Seemann placed his ad on Moulitsas' Web site, something amazing happened. The Daily Kos community repaid his loyalty by emptying their own wallets. "The place went nuts," recalls Tim Tagaris, who served as Seemann's communications director. "Everyone was so worried about Markos. There became this mini-fund-raising drive for Jeff Seemann."
As a late-comer myself, I'm assuming this article chronicles most of that orthodoxy. Some of you longer-in-the-toothers might want to add to it.