David Talbot: It’s easy to forget, but 1995–1996 was a strange kind of quiet, almost apolitical per­iod in America. The Republicans and Newt Gingrich had retaken Congress, but Clinton had fought back. It looked like he was cruising to reelection in ’96 against Dole. Things were pretty ho-hum. It was before the storm.
Wes Boyd: Joan and I were working on education software.
Joan Blades, cofounder, MoveOn.org: I was also a mediator, by training and inclination.
David Talbot: I was working at the old Examiner, which was a very interesting place in those days, filled with refugees from weekly newspapers and novelists and nutcases. What I really was desperate to do was start a national magazine. There was so much talent here. But it would have cost $25 million to launch a national magazine in print.
Marc Cooper, special correspondent, HuffingtonPost.com: No matter how sophisticated you thought our democracy was, up until the mid-’90s or so it was very difficult to publish anything. You had to own the means of production in order to get published.
David Talbot: Then this new thing, the Internet, came along. It was like a gift from God. We were in the right place at the right time. This is where the capital was, where the talent was, where the vision was. We got a little bit of money from Apple, 60 grand, and we started Salon, which was really the first online general-interest magazine.
Marc Cooper: The Internet allowed the means of production to be seized by the citizenry, and that totally changed the game.
David Talbot: In the beginning, we wanted to focus on books and movies and culture. But then the Clinton administration headed into crisis, and Salon found its reason to exist.
Wes Boyd: Joan and I had sold our business, and just as we were raising our heads from that, all this crazy stuff was happening—Monica Lewinsky, Ken Starr, the impeachment.
David Talbot: We were so sick of the obsession with the blow job. Our view was that Bill Clinton, whatever you think about him, doesn’t deserve to be impeached over a consensual sexual act. We were frustrated by the pack mentality in Beltway journalism, whereas we had a let-it-rip, gonzo-journalism mentality, in the tradition of what Rolling Stone and Hunter Thompson were doing here in the ’70s. We figured, if you really want to play this game, let’s expose the hypocrisy of Clinton’s critics.
Joan Blades: Six months into the impeachment fiasco, we’d had enough, so we sent out a one-sentence petition to less than a hundred of our friends and family. It was just sensible: Congress must immediately censure the president and move on to the more pressing issues facing the nation. Within a week, we had a hundred thousand people sign that petition. Ultimately, we got half a million signatures. That was the beginning of MoveOn.
David Talbot: Salon ran a sex-scandal story about an affair involving Henry Hyde, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, who was overseeing impeachment for the Republicans. The rest of the media jumped all over us—we were sleazemongers, we were this, we were that. We had bomb threats. But we were also in the forefront of those saying, “There’s a poisonous political agenda behind this impeachment process that needs to be derailed.” We actually defined the right-wing conspiracy before Hillary put a name to it.
Wes Boyd: People were feeling really cynical. Progressives had forgotten the basics. So from the very beginning, MoveOn took on the tone of civic engagement. A couple weeks after we started, we said, “OK, let’s just ask volunteers to visit the local offices of their members of Congress.” Every email we sent out was basically a treatise in civics: If you do something, even just attend this meeting, it will make a difference.
David Talbot: I remember getting those first MoveOn emails and going, “Hey, these are our soul brothers.” They were doing the political-organizing version of what we were doing in journalism. They also struck me as very Bay Area—not beholden to the media and political establishment, reflecting a frontier sensibility that you don’t find in New York or Washington. Those places are provincial and suffocating and incapable of creating breakaways like Salon or MoveOn. I like to think that what we started in the mid-’90s filtered throughout the country and gave rise to the whole blogging phenomenon. Arianna Huffington got her start online as a columnist for Salon. And Keith Olbermann, when he was in the wilderness—he had been fired by everyone, including Fox—came to Salon and did columns for us.
Joan Blades: After the Clinton impeachment, the next viral moment for us was the Iraq War.
Markos Moulitsas: When I started Daily Kos in 2002, there was no way anyone would have predicted how big we would become. Blogs were in the hundreds, and you’d go, “600 visitors in a day, wow!” But it was clear that the media was underserving people. Someone needed to bypass those media gatekeepers who were dictating what the public consumed and squashing dissent.
Craig Newmark: The traditional press has often been weak when it comes to speaking truth to power. Bloggers have no trouble with that.
Markos Moulitsas: What does the Left believe in? Everyone’s got a different opinion. Now, suddenly, we have a medium that embraces that diversity of feeling and allows it to thrive.
Joan Blades: We discovered our members were willing to pay for advertising. They were willing to pay to be heard. The fundraising potential was huge. And we could get people mobilized very quickly. The vigils prior to the Iraq War were jaw-dropping, and we did them online in a week!
Andy Rappaport, venture capitalist and funder of progressive causes: By 2004, we really believed—and I’m not overstating—that another four years of George Bush would mean the end of the American way of life, the destruction of our position in the world, and possibly the literal destruction of the planet. If there ever were an incumbent who should have been defeatable, it was Bush. But there was also a very great sense among many of us that the Democratic Party had lost its way.
Joan Blades: Before the 2004 election, MoveOn reached out to all of the presidential candidates. Howard Dean’s campaign is the only one that took us up on it.
Joe Trippi, political consultant: The majority of the Democratic establishment thought the Internet and the netroots were like a bar scene out of Star Wars or a small group of people talking to each other in their underwear. They thought it was a big waste of time, a fad.
Markos Moulitsas: With Dean, the online money started to be there, but the rest of it wasn’t. The ground part fizzled.
Andy Rappaport: The Democrats had no infrastructure to build on. As the election approached, we asked, “Is the Democratic establishment going to win against that Republican machine that’s just been building for all these years?” No. Democrats didn’t know how to win. So, what are we going to do to change that? If you’re here in Silicon Valley, the answer is, you try a bunch of experiments. Then you invest in the ones that work, scale them up, and kill the ones that don’t. I’ve just described venture capital to you. So a few of us donors and activists—some here, some elsewhere—figured, let’s throw a lot of money and energy and ideas at the problem and see what we come up with. Let’s see, for example, if we can figure out how to get young people engaged.
Matt Buchanan, associate editor, Gizmodo.com: Historically, the youth vote was, like, a giant bucket of fail.
Angela Petrella, Obama campaign volunteer: For years, nobody my age gave a shit.
Andy Rappaport: Our approach was very controversial. We weren’t putting our money behind Kerry or even the Democratic Party—we were going outside the system. Plus, the Democratic establishment worried that if young people do vote, they’ll vote Republican. In many cases, the party said, “You’re stupid and dangerous, because you’re just pulling money away from the things that are, quote unquote, proven to work.”
Angela Petrella: In 2004, I was superinvolved in the Kerry campaign, living in Ohio, working in the shitty little headquarters office in my hometown. It felt like an uphill battle. None of my friends were that involved, so it was like a lone-wolf feeling. Everyone was much older than me—old hippies. Then Kerry lost, and I felt so defeated.
Peter Leyden: It was the darkest of times. People were talking about a permanent Republican major­ity. The Democrats who were still in power were cowering, spineless.
David Talbot: There was the feeling that the Republicans had been getting away with murder for so long, and the Democrats were the nerdy kid with glasses. The bully grabs our glasses and crushes our glasses and slaps us around, and we just—well, we just cry.
Markos Moulitsas: I had feared that if Kerry won, the Democratic Party hacks would think all the prob­lems were fixed. So instead of feeling defeated and wallowing in self-pity, we recognized the opportunity to really shake things up.
Peter Leyden: After 2004, the netroots and bloggers were the only people holding off the conservatives. In mythic terms, they were the band of warriors that was doing battle, giving everyone else breathing space to get their shit together. They were completely outmatched, but totally fearless. They were absolute heroes.
Tim Dickinson: People like Kos and Joe Trippi reinvented the possible. They started to show that there was a totally different way to run politics.
Markos Moulitsas: A lot of my activities and ideas have been predicated on the right-wing example. I like that Karl Rove would basically do whatever it took to win, and that he worked toward victory in a very unconventional manner. Traditional progressives act as if politics is a high-minded debate about ideas. No! Politics is politics, you have to win to make a difference, and you can’t bring a spork to a gunfight. I’m not above getting down in the mud when it’s called for, as long as it’s legal. I may hate doing it, but if it’s gonna help my side, I’ll use it. I’m happiest when I’m attacking.
Peter Leyden: Truth squadding was part of what the blogs were doing. But they were also organizing when no one had any hope of organizing and supporting people who were running for office.
Markos Moulitsas: The presidential race is all the media elite wants to talk about, but people care about what’s happening in their own backyard. What you learn quickly is that you don’t need to be the expert anymore. You let the local diarists on Daily Kos who know what they’re talking about fill you in. We’ve been talking about Barack Obama since early 2003, when he was 5 or 10 percent in the polls in the U.S. Senate primary. Why? Because I follow the Illinois state senate? No. Because the locals were telling me about him.
Peter Leyden: Blogs started figuring out ways to squeeze out money for candidates. They started the intellectual thinking that made 2006 and 2008 possible.
Markos Moulitsas: We built the grassroots level with a true 50-state strategy, focusing on races all over the country. That’s been in the DNA of Daily Kos from the beginning—me railing against how the Democratic National Committee hasn’t been to Louisiana or Alabama, so how are we supposed to win there? Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy came specifically from our 50-state strategy.
Andy Rappaport: People thought a 50-state strat­egy was craziness. Well, it wasn’t crazy. It was really, really smart.
Peter Leyden: It was the netroots’ critical work in certain races—like the Virginia Senate race, where they helped bring down George Allen, and in Mon­tana, where they defeated Conrad Burns and elected Jon Tester—that flipped the Senate for the Democrats in 2006, which was huge.
Andy Rappaport: We were learning that to get young people to vote, you have to make it easier for them to register. Another thing that really works is when your friends encourage you to take action. So we funded more organic, locally based, peer-to-peer organizations, like New Era Colo­rado, Washington Bus, and Forward Montana. Everybody is wondering, how the hell did deep-red Montana elect Jon Tester? The answer is, it has an overwhelmingly large young population, and we’d been working to mobilize it for years.
Peter Leyden: Back when all these efforts began, I thought that they would take 5, maybe 10, years to bear fruit.
Andy Rappaport: Suddenly, we had a community saying, “We know how to do this! Presidency? Let me at ’em. So what people here did—again, this is the Valley way—was say, “Who do we want to run? Who represents what we want the Democratic Party to become? Who has a chance to win?”

Next: Chapter 3
2006–2007: Incubating a bold new brand