Newsweek has hired a matched pair of columnists to write about the 2008 campaign: DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and Karl Rove. Although some have criticized the arrangement, Moulitsas seems pleased that the magazine found someone of his stature to play the conservative role in the left-right pairing. Moulitsas’ appointment was announced before Rove’s, and for a while some conservative bloggers speculated that another blogger might get the job. Turns out it was Rove, and Moulitsas liked the idea:

I still think it’s funny the wingnutosphere thought one of their lame bloggers would get offered the gig.
Newsweek actually got this right, for once. They balanced out a movement progressive with a movement conservative. In years past, Rove’s “balance” would’ve been Bob Shrum. Now, they’re apparently starting to realize the difference between a movement partisan and an establishment hack.

If Moulitsas senses that there might be just a tiny achievement gap separating himself and Rove, he doesn’t let on. Rove has, after all, helped elect, and then re-elect, a president, and even his critics concede he has a rather astonishing knowledge of American politics. And Moulitsas? In his recent book The Argument, Matt Bai describes hanging out during a tour to promote Moulitsas’ own book, Crashing the Gate:

“Hey, I know what my next book is going to be,” Markos told us. “‘The Libertarian Democrat.’” He went on a short riff about how the party needed to reposition itself as the defender of individuals against an intrusive conservative government. Markos said he considered himself more a true libertarian than a traditional liberal. I asked him if he had ever read F.A. Hayek.
“No,” he said.
One of the hallmarks of netroots culture was a complete disconnect from history – meaning, basically, anything that had happened before 1998. The political consciousness of most of the bloggers seemed to begin sometime around impeachment, when they had first tuned in. Whatever had gone on before then, the fight between Clinton and the liberal establishment, the very real debates inside the party over trade and taxes and defense – all of these things felt as ancient to the bloggers as the underlying causes of the Peloponnesian War, and about as useful. It wasn’t just that the bloggers didn’t know much about the political world before impeachment; it was that they didn’t want to know, either. So burning was their contempt for “Washington insiders” and the “mainstream media” that they were moved to dismiss not just the individuals who fell into these categories, but all the knowledge such people had accumulated. In a sense, the way the netroots saw it, the more you knew about Democratic politics before 1998, the less relevant you actually were.