At the Daily Standard, Dean Barnett says Markos “Screw Them” Zuniga is the most popular and important force in the blogosphere: Taking Kos Seriously.

Kos outwardly and unambiguously defines his role differently. He has proudly assumed the task of getting Democrats elected and never denies that he is an activist, not an objective commentator. He has built the Daily Kos community to further that activism with painstaking care. And while Kos is certainly not the finest writer in the blogosphere, he is amongst its shrewdest operators. And by almost any measure, he is the most successful blogger in the business.

TEN MONTHS AGO Kos’s ascendancy seemed hardly pre-ordained. On April 1, 2004, Kos responded to the savage murder of four American contractors in Falluja by writing, “I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries [sic]. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.”

At the time of this outburst, Kos was using his blog as a platform to create advertising revenue and to establish credibility for a political consulting business. His outburst threatened to destroy the budding project.

Immediately Kos’ foils in the conservative blogosphere demanded that the politicians who advertised on Daily Kos remove their ads and disassociate themselves from both the site and its proprietor. One of the first to heed this call was Texas Democrat Martin Frost. His campaign noted its departure from Kos’s site by saying, “There is no place for these disgusting remarks in this nation’s discussion on foreign policy.” Other campaigns followed the Frost campaign’s lead and it seemed like Kos might have been in trouble.

But then something funny happened. While politicians distanced themselves from the site, Kos’s fans stayed put. A quick glance at Kos’s traffic figures for April of 2004 shows no drop-off in the wake of Moulitsas’ controversial comments. And since the eyeballs remained, politicians soon returned. Political advertisers who had left were replaced in short order by other office seekers. At first it seemed the entire affair might ruin Kos; in the end it was, as he put it in an interview with the New York Times, nothing more than a “blip.”

A couple of points in response: yes, DailyKos apparently has very high traffic, as measured by SiteMeter. However, the traffic presumably reflects the fact that DailyKos offers “journals” to selected users; I have no idea how many of these journals exist, but this means that DailyKos is something of a blog hosting service, not an individual’s blog. (Also, after the election, DailyKos traffic took a downturn and has been sliding since.)

Yes, DailyKos continued to get lots of traffic and political advertisements, and posts by Barbara Boxer, etc., even after his disgusting remark about the US contractors murdered and torn apart by a mob in Fallujah. But I’d question how important this makes him, or how successful he is in his activist role, given the fact that all 15 of the Democratic candidates sponsored by DailyKos lost their elections. That’s not how I’d normally define “success.”