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Markos Moulitsas Zuniga

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga is the founder of Daily Kos, a Democratic political blog. With fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong he authored Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics.

Josh Israel interviewed Moulitsas on September 4, 2007.

As a bit of background, you created Daily Kos in 2002. What did you envision the site to be?

Nothing. It’s a place for me to — it was therapy.

How many people would you say visit the site each day nowadays?

Depending on who you believe, between half a million to a million people a day.

Throughout this project we have talked to a bunch of presidential candidates and strategists and fundraisers. And they all seem to be saying the same thing: that the Internet and the blogosphere is totally revolutionizing presidential campaign fundraising. Bob Dole remarked to us that in his run, as recently as 1996, the term “blogger,” if you had heard it, one would have thought it was some kind of disease. Can you talk a little bit about the growth of online political donations and the role of the “netroots” over the past few years?

How do I put this? It’s hard to say. I mean, direct contributions to campaigns and to the political process are still relatively tiny. Two of the sites last cycle raised $1.5 million, which in a $2 billion election is really inconsequential. Now of course, a lot of those campaigns re-solicit those individuals time and time again. They are all small-dollar donors. So it helped to [build] fundraising lists that they could use over and over again. So indirectly, I would say it raised a lot more, but nothing like a MoveOn can raise. MoveOn can raise $1 million in an e-mail right off the bat. I think what we can do in the netroots more than fundraising is build buzz and credibility for campaigns, and attract the media’s attention to certain groups that are being underreported or ignored altogether. And when you do that, of course, there is a fundraising boon to that. That doesn’t necessarily link to us directly. Campaigns benefit from having people paying attention to them in ways that go beyond whether my readers drop 20 bucks into a race.

But at the end of the day, it’s hard to say. I don’t know. And I don’t think there is ever really a way to directly gauge how effective that is — that I know of anyway.

When a candidate raises money in a fundraiser hosted by a lobbyist or some interest group, it comes with the perception that those donors are gaining influence and access on behalf of some interest. Is there some perceived interest that netroots money represents?

No. I think the way we are evolving is that there has to be — I mean one of them is party loyalty. I mean, you can’t be [Joe] Lieberman; otherwise we’ll go after you. You can’t run against your party. You can’t attack your party. So there is just sort of that party-loyalty component, which doesn’t mean you have to vote with the party at all times.

You have somebody like a Ben Nelson of Nebraska who doesn’t vote with the party very often. Ben Nelson votes with the party maybe half of the time. But he doesn’t run against the Democratic Party. He doesn’t cast his votes and talk about how morally corrupt the Democratic Party is or how it just wants to raise taxes. He doesn’t sit there and reinforce right-wing conservative talking points or attack points against Democrats. So people like that get a pass, because it’s a reality that their district, for a Democrat, is a tough place.

Nebraska is not exactly a liberal bastion yet?

So when I mean party loyalty, I don’t mean vote with the party 100 percent of the time. I mean don’t undermine the party from within, and voting against the majority position of the party doesn’t undermine it from within. Going on Fox News and talking about how Democrats need to change their ways, because they are so wrong on everything, undermines the Democratic Party, which is what Joe Lieberman famously did, which got him booted out of the party by Connecticut voters.

Right now Iraq is clearly becoming a litmus test, and defending the Constitution. I mean, this FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] bill that was passed right before the recess was a huge rally cry for us. And it really sort of brought home that we are not going to sit there and say you have to vote “x,” “y,” and “z” on issue “x,” “y,” and “z.”
You have to vote this way on choice and this way on labor. We are not the old-school, traditional issue-based litmus test.

But there are some broad-based concerns of ours, one of them being, don’t undermine the party. The second one would be defend the Constitution. If nothing else, defend the Constitution. And the third being Iraq; it’s the majority position. Everybody wants out of Iraq. It’s an unpopular war. It’s an unpopular president. It’s an unpopular Republican Party. What the hell are Democrats afraid of?

So it is an ideological interest more than any personal?

If you can slot those into ideology, it’s getting into nomenclature.

But there is no financial interest to a netroots donor?

I don’t know what there could be. I mean, there was this aborted effort to regulate blogs last year, but we killed it at the regulatory level, because it never really got to Congress. I think that might be it. If there became an issue where blogs were regulated and our political speech was in danger, then, maybe we demand something from our elected officials.

But like I said, the FEC [Federal Election Commission] conclusively ruled in our favor. Congress never had to get involved. And beyond that, I can’t imagine what possibly we could demand out of them that would go beyond these broad sort of more — I don’t even know what you call them. I mean it’s almost a style issue over like substance of legislation. So we are not coming up with model legislation and saying “Pass this energy bill,” because we are just regular people. We are a financial interest. We are not an industry interest.

But there are not a lot of set-asides that can be earmarked for bloggers?

Right, exactly. And there are hundreds of thousands of us. I mean, you can’t even get to the point where — I mean, everybody has their cause, their pet issue. But we are very much a coalition movement, and one that’s been really built on a strong foundation of not being beholden to any one interest on any one issue or one topic, which I know drives a lot of people crazy. They talk about how I have no ideology, [that] all I care about is winning. There is no way we could come up with an agenda everybody would sign on to. And there is no need.

People have commented to us pretty uniformly that the reason that presidential campaigns are so expensive is the cost of television, and that to reach a media market with even one ad, it can cost millions of dollars to get a real hit. With the rise in online communities, do you think online messaging might bring down the cost of national campaigning?

I have no idea. In a perfect world, it would. It’s just like movie studios can spend a crapload of money advertising a product, a movie. If it doesn’t get good word-of-mouth that first weekend, the movie is dead, right?

We are the word-of-mouth in the political realm to what those early movie-watchers are in the Hollywood world. [It would] matter if these candidates don’t get good word-of-mouth from influence-makers, which are, essentially, our readership. I mean, these are the most hardcore political junkies. They are people who, in their social circle at parties and whatnot, people come up to them and ask: “What do you think about this election? Who do you like?”

These are the guys who really drive a lot of the political activity on the ground. And they are not going to be swayed by political ads. Actually, that’s not true. They are not going to be swayed by political ads on television — because people watch them online. You don’t need to go watch them on television. You can see them online and see what they have to say and how good the ads are and things like that.

So in that regard, there is a new way to get around and spend that much money to reach kind of the army on the ground. But to reach the general voter, they are not going to be online. And I am never going to reach them. And no blogger ever is, because by definition we are designed, and even the way I write is designed for people who know what they are talking about in politics. I am not going to sit there and describe every acronym. If I talk about the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee], I assume that everybody reading the site knows what the DSCC is. Go out to the general public, and they are not going to know what the heck the DSCC is, not even remotely something they had come across and think about.

Even if you told them what it was, they still might not know what it was.

Of course. So those people, how are you going to reach them? Having a big ground army helps, because you can go out and canvas and knock on doors. But television is still going to be a big issue. Now what’s going to happen, and this is where I really don’t know how this plays out is, when we have convergence in about five or 10 years, and TV and Internet are one and the same, and everybody is now a broadcaster. And I can have Kos TV online, and people are watching it on television, pulling it up on their TiVos. That means that probably the major networks are going to lose tons and tons of [viewership].

There is so much great content on YouTube right now that I have no doubt that amateurs produce just as good or better content than the studios are providing. You’ve seen the major networks bleed viewership, because they can pull up anything online on their televisions. You go from 500 channels to 10 billion channels. What happens? Does that mean that the cost of advertising with the networks goes down, or does that mean that campaigns can advertise in even more venues, because they have to advertise on the Google channel and on the Yahoo channel and on the Daily Kos channel and everything else? I don’t know. I don’t know how that plays out.

From a theoretical standpoint, it’s quite fascinating to me to see how this is all playing out. But I don’t have any [idea] particularly how it’s going to shake out. I do know that things like TiVo are reducing the effectiveness of advertising on television, so campaigns are going to have to find other ways to reach their target audience. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to spend less. It just means that they have to find alternate methods.

And the reason that it doesn’t mean less is because, say, they realize that, well, Google is a great place to reach a target audience. You can geo-target. You get regular people who are just looking for whatever, but we’ll hit them with ads. Right now those ads, compared to television, are far less expensive. But what happens if demand for those ads pick up? Prices will go up. So who knows? I mean in the short term it might mean less money. Long term, I don’t know.

It could mean more?

Yeah.

One of the criticisms or the questions that people have raised about bloggers is what sort of ethical responsibility they have when they are being paid by campaigns — to identify that. In your experience, do bloggers sort of self-regulate on that?

Yeah. I mean the only thing a blogger has is his or her credibility. That’s it. We don’t have to have a big fancy masthead or 100 years of publishing or money to back us up and make us credible. If we are not open and forthcoming with our readers and with our colleagues in the blogosphere, our reputation takes a hit. Like I said, that’s the only thing we have. So those of us who take this stuff seriously guard that reputation with our lives.

So it’s important to disclose any such conflicts. And most do. Of course, there are some that don’t. But ultimately it’s about self-regulating, as the media world is anyway. You have people like James Carville talking about the presidential election and not bothering to tell anybody that he’s a special adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So ultimately, I think we are far more accountable to our readership and our colleagues in the blogosphere than these old media types who continue to flout ethical guidelines and continue to hide who they belong to and what conflicts of interests they may have.

A lot of people with the, I guess, mainstream media, or at least the mainstream media as existed in the older days.

I call it the “traditional” media.

Traditional. Well, even traditional media is barely what it was. But they talk about how you can say anything on a blog, and there is no editor filtering you. There is no fact-checking process.

That’s not necessarily true. You can have that stuff. You can have the Talking Points Memo empire, that’s very much writers and editors, TPM Cafe and those guys. TPM Muckraker.

It’s not a fair criticism?

No. I am saying there are blogs that have editors and operate in that kind of model. So I mean everyone talks about blogs like it’s something, a type of content. But really, at the end of the day, it’s just a tool that allows anybody to publish online with little difficulty, just mass publishing. That’s all a blog is.

There are so many different kinds of blogs that to try to make any sort of generalization about blogs would be like making a generalization about the type of content that a magazine is, not understanding that some magazines are gossip rags. Some of them are conspiracy things. Some of them are fantasy. Some of them are good, solid journalism. Some are partisan polemic. “A magazine” doesn’t tell you what kind of content something is. “Blog” doesn’t tell you what kind of content that blog is. Anyway, it’s a little pet peeve.

So back to your question. I cut you off. Sorry about that.

No, I think you pretty much answered it. It was sort of the question of what the filter is; does that sort of go back to your point about credibility?

Yeah. I mean the filter is those blogs that are consistently high quality and are consistently accurate in what they write about; [they] can rise to the top. Good writers rise to the top. There are no traditional gatekeepers and filters like in the old medium, where you have a certain amount of money, or you have to have a fancy last name, come from a rich family, or you had to work up through the dregs of journalism world to get anywhere where you can actually talk about whatever it is you want to talk about.

Now, blogging allows anybody to say whatever the hell they want. And society at large becomes a filter. They decide what has value and what doesn’t. I mean, this isn’t a bunch of elites tucked away in some ivory tower making these decisions for us huddled masses down below. I mean, we are making those decisions for ourselves. We don’t need anybody to tell us who we should respect, who we should take seriously. They have lost the right to do so by being so consistently wrong on everything.

They are the ones who still tell us that somebody like Bill Kristol should be taken seriously as a commentator when he is one of so many of these people who are so wrong on the war in Iraq. I mean, the Joe Kleins and the David Broders, they have been wrong, wrong, wrong on thing after thing after thing. And we are supposed to take them seriously, because the media gatekeepers tell us those people should be taken seriously. Well, we reject that. We decide for ourselves who we take seriously. And that isn’t going to be people who have been consistently wrong from the little perches inside the Beltway.

I read a comment, actually by you, on your blog today. You said something to the effect that you are no fan of big current campaign-finance regime, which is an abject disaster. It needs to be scrapped and started from scratch. Where would you start?

First of all, I think the big question is, Why do these regulations exist? I got an up-close-and-personal crash course on campaign-finance law when I was going to this FEC thing two years ago, I think it was 2005. And it was amazing to me to sit there next to the so-called reformers: the Democracy 21 and Common Cause and those guys. And they were arguing that the [point] of campaign-finance laws is to keep money out of elections, which to me is absolutely, patently absurd. That’s not the reason campaign-finance laws exist.

The reason they exist, I thought, was to prevent the buying of politicians and [to prevent] corruption. So it’s not money, per se; [money] isn’t the evil. It’s the buying of influence that’s evil, as I always understood it — maybe I am naive and stupid, who knows? So what happens is, they are ticked off and they are attacking like Daily Kos because we are raising money for candidates— solely because we are raising money for candidates.

That’s what they’re angry about. If they made the case, well, these people are unduly influencing the political process or are buying politicians — then you have an argument. But they were upset that money was inherently evil.

And then you get into the ridiculousness of the whole system where you have [former Federal Election Commission General Counsel] Larry Noble sitting next to me arguing that if the state party has a website — Arizona was the example that he used — and it’s a picture on that homepage of John McCain, a federal candidate, that they can measure how much of a percentage of a home screen that little picture John McCain had. And then that would be a federal expense, because you are promoting a federal candidate.

And I was thinking, what if you have an 800 x 600 resolution monitor but then suddenly you upgrade the computer and you have 1200 x 600 resolution? Then what? It’s a different percentage. I mean, it was so patently ridiculous.

And if you have the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] and coordinated a campaign, you had to put a wall between those guys and the people working this division and put another wall between people doing that. You end up spending more money, first of all, on lawyers trying to make sense of all that bullshit.

And second of all, to duplicate these, all three divisions of — I forget how many can coordinate with each other — but they are all doing the same polling with the same fricking race, because they can’t share the polling with each other. So you become less efficient. You have to spend more money to try to keep these separations intact. I mean, to me that’s so patently absurd. And there have been some excellent proposals of ways to keep money from allowing people to buy influence. That is the bottom line. So I don’t care if there is a lot of money in the system as long as it’s not buying anything.

What sort of ways do you think would work?

I have seen one really compelling proposal. I forget the names of the guys who did it. But basically your donation would go to the FEC. And then they would distribute to the candidates by stripping all of the identifying information of who it came from, so there is no way to tell. Somebody could claim that they gave you that $2,000 check, but there is no way for you to verify it. So suddenly, if people can’t verify if certain checks came in, because the FEC is masking that information, then it gets a lot harder to “buy influence.”

Then, of course, there is publicly funded stuff. My jury is still open on that. I don’t know the best way to approach that. But I am very willing to give it a shot and to consider that as an option. So the issue at the end of the day, really, isn’t that people are spending money on campaigns. To reach a lot of people — it’s a big country — you have to spend a lot of money. And at the end of the day, last year’s campaign costs were $2 billion. That’s a fraction of what big corporate America is spending to market its products. And I don’t know what’s more important, who wins the elections or the Pepsi and Coke marketing budgets.

But some would have different views on that, probably.

Who wins the election is probably more important; to me it seems more important. I don’t mind the spending of money. What I mind is the buying of influence. And that’s why I think those laws need to be completely rethought. I very strongly believe that our campaign-finance laws keep a lot of people from running for office, because it’s so freaking complicated.

I have a neighbor who would be a fantastic candidate for state legislature. Here it’s the California laws; it’s not the federal law. But it’s the same problem. You look at these campaign-finance laws and you go, “I would have to get a lawyer to even understand what the hell I’m supposed to do to announce my candidacy.” It prices a lot of people out. It keeps people out of the system.

Last question for you: Sort of looking ahead to 2008, what do you imagine will be the role of Daily Kos? And what do you think, if anything, will be different about it as far as the role of the blogosphere compared with previous elections?

I am not changing anything. So what we did in 2004, 2006 — I mean, it’s going to be the same thing. We are going to keep an eye on races. We are going to try to identify places where we can make gains and try to support the Democratic candidates and oppose the Republicans strategically in as many places as we can. Rally the troops. Talk them into contributing. Talk them into volunteering their time for a lot of these races. Keep an eye on Republican dirty tricks. Expose their lies as they come up — and plenty of them will. And, overall, just be a place where political junkies can come in and find out what’s going on politically during the day. I mean, it is what it is. I am not really going to mess with success at this point.