My mission is to find Matt Drudge, and I’m failing. I’ve e-mailed the author of the Drudge Report countless times, and written letters to him at the two places he owns in Miami to say that I’m coming to town and want to talk, but when I check into my hotel, there’s still no note from him at the desk. It’s late Sunday night, and in my room I turn on the weekly radio show he broadcasts to scores of American cities – apparently from his living room. Drudge is on his favourite theme, surveillance cameras everywhere, his belief that Google wants to spy on us and pass it all on to the government. At such times, Drudge comes across as a hunted man.

“I just don’t want to be watched. So many cameras everywhere. And now you start feeding that into some kind of database and start linking it up with Google? This is a serious issue. It is a total transformation of our society and our liberties. What gives you a right? Why are you watching me? People say, well, what do you have to hide, Drudge? You know what? The burden should be on them. I think I have a right not to be watched.”

I call in to the show a few times: 1-866-4-drudge. Busy. You can often hear Drudge at his keyboard even when he’s on air, so I drop him another e-mail. Then the next morning I go round to his two addresses.

I’d e-mailed Drudge “Not Stalking You; Coming to Miami,” because I know how feverish he is about the prying press. When Lindsay Lohan had her accident in Beverly Hills in May, Drudge said it was caused by violent “stalkerazzi”. He said: “That’s probably why she was drunk and higher than a kite… because she has no life and no privacy… they create their villains and then they report on them.”

Not that this philosophy keeps Drudge from posting paparazzi pictures on the Drudge Report, or milking the Paris Hilton drama. I ring and knock on two doors: the high-rise condo on the beach where Drudge first moved when he came to Miami in 2001, then the $1.4m Mediterranean-style stucco house he bought on Rivo Alto Island a couple of years later. There’s a large, faded American flag hanging from a palisade and two cars in the driveway, but no sign of the Corvette that Drudge listed on old condo records in 2002, nor the black Mustang of more recent vintage. The fact is, I’m not even sure where Drudge lives. A friend says that the 40-year-old Drudge couldn’t deal with the upkeep on the house and moved back to a condo on the beach, and the Los Angeles Times says it slipped a note under Drudge’s door at the Four Seasons tower, the tallest building on the bay.

On his radio show, Drudge tries to throw his pursuers off the scent. “I have not missed a day in nearly 13 years. They keep saying, ‘Oh, the secret life of Matt Drudge.’ There is no secret life here. It is found literally on the website, because this is all I’ve been doing.”

Drudge’s greatest notoriety, breaking the fact that Newsweek had killed a story on a White House intern’s involvement with Bill Clinton and then breaking the name Monica Lewinsky a day later, occurred nearly 10 years ago.

Back then he was a gossip; today, notoriety has given way to something else: respect. This respect derives from the fact that so many journalists, political operatives, financiers – just about anyone in public life – consult his website, www.drudgereport.com, several times a day to know what others are talking about. “This is America’s bulletin board, and much more than that,” NBC’s Brian Williams said recently.

“Matt Drudge is just about the most powerful journalist in America,” said the veteran conservative author Pat Buchanan.

That power is looming as the country readies itself for 2008. Drudge’s status was underscored in the book The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, in which the authors Mark Halperin (of Time magazine) and John F Harris (now the editor in chief of The Politico, and formerly of The Washington Post) said that Drudge was the “Walter Cronkite of his era,” in terms of his ability to steer the public agenda at a time when the “freak show” moments of a candidate’s behaviour or past can play such a large role in the political process.

That process has, of course, largely hurt Democrats. “He is the centre of personality-obsessed, attack-based politics. That is the content Drudge looks for,” says Glenn Greenwald, a leading left-wing internet voice, one of many that are taking Drudge on as the snake in the Eden of American democracy, the guy who gets the media to take seriously trivial or scurrilous gossip, like John Edwards’s $400 haircut, or the Swift Boat Veterans’ attack on John Kerry three years ago.

The Drudge Report is an institution, the seventh-most-visited American news website in the United States. (Drudge, a self-deprecating globalist, likes to point out that news sites in China and India log far more traffic.) Getting linked on Drudge can unleash a tsunami of public mentions and e-mails, and journalists cater to Drudge to gain those links, alerting him when their stories have nasty anecdotes. Drudge laughs that journalists “kiss the ring”.

The left calls Drudge a right-winger, but Drudge calls himself an anti-government libertarian. The Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s positions are “true to my heart. But I look at him and say, ‘The guy can’t lead.’” But Drudge’s political philosophy is more mysterious than that, given that, currently, the one person Drudge seems to believe can lead is Hillary Clinton. Though Drudge often savages Hillary, he is convinced that she will make history, and he seems determined, in spite of himself, to empower her. “Hillary on Surge? ‘It’s working’ ” was a recent headline.

The Clinton scandals of yesteryear bore him, Drudge has said. Right-wing fans have begun to complain about the pattern, calling him “Hillary-obsessed”. What an irony that the gossip who almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency might propel his wife to the Oval Office.

“That House is going pink,” says Drudge.

Who is the man behind the website? The more power Drudge has attained, the more reclusive he has become. Drudge seems to despise his own fame. On radio he speaks of himself as a nobody, and has referred to his fans as “psychic vampires”. He has compartmentalised his life, separating the personal and the public. Acquaintances describe very brief, formal encounters, and even friends of Drudge’s – if there is such a category – generally communicate with him by instant messaging on AOL. He’s said by some to be gay, but he denies this.

Those who know him guard his privacy.

Andrew Breitbart, a conservative writer living in Brentwood, California, who Drudge says is his only employee – “Andrew does the afternoon shift” – e-mailed me that “I haven’t talked to him in over a year”, then declined to talk.

“Everything I’ve said about Drudge is on LexisNexis,” e-mails Lucianne Goldberg, the right-wing webmaster who played a crucial role in stirring up the Lewinsky case.

Another one of Drudge’s power mamas, the social critic and author Camille Paglia, also sends her regrets. “In regard to my friendship with Matt, I think that anyone who provides private details to a journalist about a public figure is not a true friend. I would certainly expect the same loyalty and discretion from my friends.”

When Drudge turns on someone, that someone becomes a non-person. The one person who spoke of this process to me was the conservative California writer David Horowitz. Horowitz had learnt of Drudge back in the Clinton-baiting days and the two became friends. When Sidney Blumenthal sued Drudge, for libel, after Drudge spread rumours that Blumenthal had abused his wife (a rumour Drudge quickly retracted), Horowitz ran to Drudge’s side and helped to get him a lawyer, and then set up a fund to assist him. He said he raised about $50,000. At that time, though, something Horowitz did ticked Drudge off, and his link vanished from the site.

Horowitz says in an agonised tone: “He’s never communicated to me, but I gather what happened is I did a fundraising letter based on his case and he thought I was exploiting him. I sent a letter without Matt’s approval. I regret not taking enough care to talk to him about it, but I was defending him. I would apologise to him, but I get silence.”

Drudge’s radio persona isn’t very personal. Almost all he ever let listeners know during the months I listened was that he used to sleep a lot until the internet changed his life. The old Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard was an icon of his youth. He’d been in Jerusalem and Buenos Aires, and on a German train he wept listening to Kelly Clarkson’s new record. He has no mobile phone but he does have a BlackBerry.

He hates taxes more than anything that the government does. “Give it back to the people you stole it from.”

Lower taxes were a prime factor in Drudge’s flight to Florida from California in 2001. Surveillance was another factor. A photographer took pictures of him through his apartment window in Hollywood. “People are basically exhibitionists and voyeurs; they’re happy to be watched,” he says, scornfully.

Goldberg said that Drudge has so many personas, nobody knew who the real Drudge was. Acquaintances say that the brilliantly snide Drudge on radio is a character. (“You horny toad! You horny toad, let me have some of your Viagra now,” Drudge spat after CBS’s Mike Wallace, doyen of American TV, crossed the privacy line, in his view, by asking whether a well-known couple in the public eye had had premarital sex.)

Says one Drudge watcher: “His demeanour off the air could not be more different than what it is on the radio. There’s a profound sweetness to him; he’s got a delicate nature that allows him to win over the enemy when he’s in the room with them.” One female friend recalled: “What I remember is the graciousness of a southern gentleman in him.”

Vulnerable, gracious Drudge has soft dark eyes and a quiet manner that seems to bring out a maternal quality in certain powerful women. “There is a very wounded-bird quality about this guy,” says Doug Harbrecht, the new-media editorial director at Kiplinger, a website devoted to investment information, who introduced Drudge to the National Press Club at his historic speech in 1998, back when recognition from the mainstream media seemed important to him.

These days, Drudge leads a life far away from the in-crowd. “He’s tanned and buff,” says a Drudge watcher. “He’s in the best physical shape of his life. And travelling at will. I think he leads the perfect life.” But is he happy?

This summer, Drudge choked up on his radio show reading a long passage from The Sheltering Sky. “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it?” Its author, the late Paul Bowles, is someone Drudge would seem to emulate in his hatred of elites and complex sexuality.

In his own life, Drudge maintains ironbound privacy, but his website has grown by seizing on incidental, personal actions of public figures and blowing them up, at times viciously. He gets over 16m hits a day. In 2000 he helped defeat Al Gore by turning up the volume on such stories as Al Gore’s fundraising appearance at a Buddhist temple. In 2004, he did more than anyone to upend Kerry by playing up a small advertisement bought by the right-wing Swift Boat Veterans, which questioned Kerry’s record of heroism during the Vietnam war, and which received little attention until Drudge publicised its claims. In this campaign season, he has made a virus of the John Edwards $400 haircut.

At times Drudge has served Hillary. In April he posted the exclusive that Hillary won the first-quarter fundraising battle in a “blowout with $36m”. Insiders say the Clinton campaign leaked the figure to spin perceptions, because most of Hillary’s contributions couldn’t be spent until the general election. “The Hillary campaign leaks their numbers on Drudge because there is no follow-up question,” says one former Democratic operative.

Drudge is now part of the establishment. It has been speculated that The New York Times has an unofficial policy of getting important stories to Drudge in advance of their publication on the net, though the newspaper denies this.

Possibly he gets his frequent Times exclusives (often attributed to “newsroom sources”) off the wire. But Drudge would seem to have a symbiotic relationship with the paper he calls the “Old Gray Lady” and whose politics he says he despises. Drudge says he doesn’t read the Los Angeles Times or The Washington Post, but he calls the Times “very influential”. The Times advertises on his site. That reflects the fact that the two publications are going after the same audience: American leaders.

Drudge’s own influence stems from the fact that he loves news, in a way that great newspeople do, and his news sensibility is extremely sophisticated. When he was a kid, he figured out that though thousands of people get murdered, only a few murders are news.

He enjoys the changing fashions in news, the plot shifts that he has a hand in engineering.

As he’s entered middle age, something noir and futuristic has entered his sensibility. The site is obsessed with global warming, with the dangers of mobile phones and cloning, with all manner of tabloid horrors. He’s a storyteller, and the stories are dark.

Matthew Nathan Drudge was born in 1966 and raised in suburban Washington, DC, the only child of two liberal, Democrat parents, who both worked for the federal government. The parents separated when Drudge was six, and his father soon moved in with another woman and her kids. Drudge’s own version of his past is spotty. He says that he “failed bar mitzvah” and barely graduated from high school in 1984. He told Playboy he was “suspended a few times” for such infractions as “cheating… on tests”.

The divorce and child-support papers in the Maryland State Archives offer a heartrending picture. About the time Drudge failed bar mitzvah, his mother left her job as a staff attorney for Ted Kennedy, where she had worked on health issues, “because of sickness”, and remained unemployed for at least two years.

The Washington Post has reported that she was hospitalised for schizophrenia. It appears that Drudge got his star power from his mother. He has proudly described his mother as a pioneering lawyer. She drove a Datsun 280Z – which at that time in the US was a flash sports car. She went by several first names and changed her last name from Kudish to Drudge to Star – the last apparently her invention.

When Drudge was 15 years old, crisis rocked the family. His mother was hospitalised, and a few weeks later Drudge was arrested. “Juvenile court told me that he was arrested on June 18 for making annoying phone calls,” his father testified in a hearing on child support. “He’s got a problem of making annoying phone calls to a girl,” Drudge’s mother testified.

After the arrest, Drudge went to live with his father on a farm on the eastern shore of Maryland and go to school there. Robert Drudge was a therapist and social worker, but the boy was evidently too much for him, and Matt wasn’t cut out for the sticks – he liked to hang out at video arcades with a Walkman, listening to tapes.

Robert Drudge sent Matt back to Washington. Drudge’s mother said his father “resents” the boy, and told this story in a diva’s style that her son would admire: “Robert Drudge rejected his natural son, Matthew, and returned him to my home, knowing that I am under doctor’s care and unemployed. His reason for returning Matthew to me after three weeks was that ‘his wife comes first, her two boys come second, and Matthew comes third’; that he did not want to assume any responsibility for him as his father because he has a new family; and that he hopes everything turns out all right. Robert Drudge has not communicated with his son or me since that time.” Young Drudge was placed in psychiatric treatment with Jewish social services. It was recommended that the boy be sent to a boarding school, “and if not the last choice will be a foster home”. (The court papers don’t say whether this came to pass.)

Drudge must have been an uncomfortable kid. He lost his books, he lost his glasses. His mother said he had “special education” needs. One friend says that Drudge started wearing the famous hat in high school to deal with premature hair loss. “This is an incredibly lonely kid. He doesn’t have a sister, his mother is in and out of hospitals, the father was beside himself. In high school they treated him like shit. He was starting to lose his hair in high school; think what that does to a kid. I find it so appealing when someone has nothing and gets somewhere.”

Robert Drudge has said his son’s case proves that the schools are unequipped to deal with difficult talents.

On his paper route, Drudge tore apart the Washington Star to see which stories and angles the editors had misplayed. In his high-school yearbook he wrote: “To everyone else who has helped and hindred [sic] me whether it be

Staff or students, I leave a penny for each day

I’ve been here and cried here. A penny rich

in worthless memories.”

Drudge’s father ultimately changed his life. After high school, the boy tried New York and Europe, then drifted to his father’s home town, Los Angeles, where he worked for years in the gift shop at CBS studios.

Worried about his son’s aimlessness, Bob Drudge insisted on buying him a Packard Bell computer in 1994. The Drudge Report began as an e-mail sent out to a few friends. Drudge’s interests were studio gossip, often plucked from trash cans at CBS, and right-wing politics.

Many in the vast right-wing conspiracy were thrown by Drudge’s hybrid sensibility, including his obsession with Hollywood gossip and box office. Hollywood scoops – including his report that Jerry Seinfeld was seeking $1m an episode – got Drudge hired, first by Wired online in 1996 and later by America Online, which was paying him $3,000 a month as a “runaway internet gossip” when he published, and quickly retracted, a rumour that Sidney Blumenthal had abused his wife. The rumour was clearly false, but the lawsuit, which was ultimately settled, exalted Drudge. For it appeared to have the backing of the Clinton White House, wanting to silence an enemy. And Blumenthal’s allegations of fact in the suit only played to the webmaster’s populist image:

“92. Defendant Drudge never attended college.

“93. Prior to the time when defendant Drudge began to work full-time writing and publishing the Drudge Report, defendant Drudge’s full-time job was as the manager of a gift-shop.”

That was just a first act. On January 18, 1998, barricaded in his Hollywood apartment with an entirely accurate sense of the historic moment, Drudge filed a breathless report claiming Newsweek had, that week, held a story reporting that Bill Clinton had had a sexual affair with a 23-year-old White House intern.

Today Drudge likes to distance himself from sexual gossip. When the former Florida congressman Mark Foley got busted for his sexual advances toward interns last year, Drudge empathised with Foley, describing the kids who flirted with him in e-mails and then turned the documents over as “beasts”.

On his radio show, he claimed to be outraged – on invasion-of-privacy grounds – when Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes asked Mitt Romney whether he and his wife had had premarital sex. “We’re in a new era of journalism,” he said on his radio show. “They’re going in and talking about a candidate’s sex life, and no one’s even getting impeached.”

Drudge then speculated that reporters would ask Hillary when she had last had sex with her husband. “And who’s going to ask her the L-word? It’s going to be a long, dirty campaign.”

Drudge often has trouble stepping away from his own dirty streak. In 2004, he published a false and damaging rumour that John Kerry had had an affair with an aide. Lately he suggested that Lance Armstrong may have left Sheryl Crow because she didn’t wipe enough (Crow has called for limiting toilet-paper consumption on environmental grounds).

He has urged people to retaliate against Google Earth’s invasions by photographing the “Google geeks” when they are having “bowel movements”. Scatological imagery is a weakness for him. Taking the side of the former Bill Clinton secretary Betty Currie, he said, “the highest ranking African-American in the Clinton administration. Who cleaned the sink and picked up the panties. Disgraceful”.

Drudge was expressing sympathy for someone demeaned by a powerful male. His mother has a creative, fiery nature, and many of his idols are women. Enthused by Hillary’s performance in a May debate, he called her “butch” several times. “She’s on the fast track for this nomination, I can tell you,” he said. “She butched it up, she butched it up!”

Today his muse in the political-philosophical realm is the ferocious, glamorous Camille Paglia. “She’s one of the hippest people I’ve come across. She goes for the deep stuff beyond the fast food.” Drudge dedicated his 2000 autobiography, Drudge Manifesto, to Linda Tripp (notwithstanding the fact that “I have never met or spoken to Matt Drudge,” Tripp says). The book states triumphantly that “technology has finally caught up with liberated individuals”. Drudge comes across as a literary character.

His only friend is a stray cat called Cat. He talks news values with Cat and the ghost of William Paley, who tells him to go through the rubbish bins at CBS for ratings figures.

In 1998 Drudge gave a speech at the National Press Club in which he was both revolutionary Tom Paine and dreamy populist.

“I used to walk these streets as an aimless teen, young adult. Daydream. Stare up at The Washington Post newsroom over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in. Didn’t go to the right schools. Never enjoyed any school, as a matter of fact. Didn’t come from a well-known family – nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty. I would never be granted any access, obtain any credentials. There wasn’t a likelihood for upward mobility in my swing-shift position at 7-Eleven.”

The best line in that speech was Drudge’s statement that “It’s more fun to talk about Godzilla than watch it.” He was introducing the reporters to the new hierarchies of the information age, when events, from Putin to Godzilla, would collapse into so much spectacle for a surfer on the net. Seriousness doesn’t interest Drudge; phenomena do. As he wrote in his book, “Politics is as Important as Hollywood. Is as Important as Science.” Drudge flattens all hard news into collage, and it is this, more than anything, that angers the old guard.

And then there’s the issue of his ideology.

The left hates Drudge for good reason; he has helped kill one Democratic presidential aspirant after another, and has started in on John Edwards this season. But as Halperin and Harris note, Drudge only gained his power because liberals so dominated traditional media that they disdained the internet. Now that he’s opened the territory, the left is doing pretty well itself. “There’s a healthy group of left-wing sites online, which tends to balance things, no doubt,” says Donna Brazile, the Democratic political strategist who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000. “But Matt is in a class by himself.”

At times Drudge does sound like a conservative. He hates big government, immigration, and abortion rights. When Jimmy Carter criticised George Bush in the foreign press, Drudge questioned his loyalty. But Drudge’s ideological heart is libertarian, and many of his anti-corporate riffs would stir a left-wing anarchist. Drudge has been highly critical of partnerships between Google and state governments, and he fears corporations. He believes that people in surgery have had chips implanted without their knowledge, that the day will come when the government will “dart” a chip into you without your permission, and that DNA will be collected from spit on the street, “and then they can impose any rule, even against smiling”.

Republicans can’t count on Drudge. He seems to despise Giuliani and McCain. “Matt is not a book reader. I think he probably struggles to make right-wing noises,” says one Republican.

Drudge was a registered Republican in California, according to state records. He then registered as “no party affiliation” in Florida.

But he doesn’t vote. The Los Angeles county registrar says Drudge didn’t vote in 2000 while registered in Los Angeles. Florida’s Division of Elections says that he didn’t vote in 2004 or ’06 while registered in Florida. Those were big elections; some people would have given eye teeth to cast a vote in Florida in 2004.

The Drudge Report has clear biases. His audience is decidedly right-wing. According to the online advertising company linked to his site, the audience is 78% male, 60% Republican, only 8% Democratic. But commentators claim that left- and right-wingers alike have called on him to use the power of the internet. Apparently, even Hillary’s campaign. Drudge has a sneaking respect for the woman he calls “the Senatress”. When Clinton started wheezing and coughing during a speech in New Orleans in May,

Drudge expressed genuine concern for her. “Hillary, dear, take care of yourself. We need you. I need you personally. Take a few days off, what’s this frenetic pace?” He added admiringly: “She was professional. She kept going. She finished the speech.” After a left-wing listener instant-messaged Drudge to say he wanted Hillary to drop dead onstage, Drudge said: “I need Hillary Clinton. You don’t get it. I need to be part of her world. That’s my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism… I have Hillary.”

In the latest turn in his noir screenplay, she’s the tough blonde. Although he still throws insults her way. Wowed by the “cold, chic” French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, Drudge said last spring that Hillary was so lacking in glamour she wasn’t fit to hem Royal’s trouser suit. He called her “big-boned”, “obese”, and “an out-of-shape middle-aged cow”, then compared her rear-end shots to the derrière of Royal, “who has birthed four children”.

That was all in the moment. A few weeks later, Drudge complimented Hillary on her new look, said she had taken his advice to hit the treadmill, and Donatella Versace’s advice to lose the trouser suit. “What’s wrong with a makeover, we’re in a makeover society,” he said.

Having once issued descriptions of Bill Clinton’s penis on some pretext, Drudge can’t wait for Hillary to be president. “I’m on the record that Hillary Clinton, she’s already in.”

There’s a paranoid frisson to that fantasy.

On his radio show, Drudge has imagined the day that cameras will record image and audio on every street so that President Hillary can listen to conversations he had, even years later. What if things take a dark turn, he says. There’s martial law. Hillary’s voice will go out to the people from loud-hailers. His words will be fed into a national database, and his opposition to global warming will make him a terrorist. He will be arrested and a chip darted into his skin. The government will meddle in our bodies. “Why don’t they get this over with and start coming door to door and collecting our body liquids,” he grumbled not long ago.

David Sheff of American Playboy remembers the moment in a long interview with Drudge when tough questions about Drudge’s sources on the right caused the webmaster to become very emotional and defensive and get out of his seat. “He stood up and grabbed his famous hat. I wondered where it was coming from. [He has] a lot more control if he’s behind the curtain in the darkened room with all his sources and his e-mail.”

Sheff’s metaphor touches on the left’s assertion that Drudge is gay and closeted. In high school, Drudge was already in a gay scene, dating men, Jeannette Walls reported in her book Dish. And in his memoir, Blinded by the Right, the conservative-turned-liberal David Brock – who is gay – described Drudge coming on to him sexually in 1997, including e-mailing Brock the suggestion that they be “f*** buddies”.

Michelangelo Signorile, a journalist who has broken down many a closet door, describes Drudge as “a nasty faggot”.

Drudge has denied that he is gay. “I go to straight bars, I go to gay bars,” he has said. The only thing you can say for sure is that Drudge has tried out many personas. In a sense, his journalistic achievement springs from these ambiguities. Drudge upset the Establishment by mixing a very patriarchal and traditional idea of news with a feminine one (box office and gossip). The mistake his enemies have repeatedly made is reducing him and underestimating him.

One night, speaking of his fears of the coming crackdown, Drudge said: “I’m personally looking for a plan-B offshore that Hillary won’t have any kind of Interpol connections.”

What a grim story line about America he was playing out: the candidates getting ugly with one another, the Google vampires surveilling, a hurricane bearing down, and Hillary at centre stage, monitoring our thoughts. Anyone else would shut their eyes. Drudge can’t wait to see what happened next.

From New York Magazine. Copyright 2007 New York Media. Distributed by Tribune Media Services