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"My thinking was: If I could actually help the party through my experience with technology, then why not?" Cyrus Krohn says about becoming eCampaign director for the RNC. (By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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An Army brat, Krohn was born in Fairfax and graduated from Lynchburg College, where he majored in communications and played lacrosse. Aside from sports, it was computers, especially the Internet, that intrigued him.

"Years ago, way before YouTube or MySpace, it was all about connecting," Krohn says. "You go on the Net to connect with people."

He's a self-described "black sheep" -- a Jewish Republican. National security has always been the issue that concerned him most. But in the early days, when people such as Krohn foresaw the Web's potential to affect politics, the focus was less on ideology and more on simply spreading the word.

His online experience goes back more than a decade. After the liberal pundit Michael Kinsley left "Crossfire" to start Slate at Microsoft, he hired Krohn, then a "Crossfire" producer, as his first employee. "He was a go-getter, a hustler," Kinsley says of Krohn. "And the thing about Cyrus is, everyone likes him -- Republicans and Democrats."

Krohn eventually became Slate's publisher. He also dabbled in writing at the online zine, and in ways that might not have pleased his own party. Krohn penned a column headlined "Bush Unbuttoned!" in July 1996 after reading a book called "Unlimited Access," touted as an FBI agent's account of a morally bankrupt Clinton White House run by bubble gum-blowing, feet-on-their-desks 30-somethings. What he witnessed in his few months as an intern in the Bush I White House, it turns out, wasn't all prim and proper. "Bubble gum does seem a bit childish; we Bush staffers preferred beer," Krohn wrote. "Four or five times that summer, the White House kitchen staff wheeled ice-cold brew right to our offices, and more than once staffers -- some of them underaged -- drank enough to pass out for the night."

He spent years selling politicians and their staffers on the value of advertising online, and, to his chagrin, more Democrats than Republicans took the plunge. While at MSN.com during the 2000 presidential race, Krohn negotiated a deal with Bill Bradley's campaign to create one of the first online political videos. From his desk, the former New Jersey senator looked at a camera. "Hi, I'm Bill Bradley, and if you're watching this, that means you're on the Internet," Krohn remembers Bradley saying. Later at Yahoo, where he directed the online portal's 2008 election strategy from its Santa Monica, Calif., office, he met with Clinton and Obama staffers to persuade them to use Yahoo's services.

It was a comfy life, living 12 blocks from the beach, and (though Yahoo has been less than stable in the past year) a comfy job, too, with stock options, and a cubicle that overlooked the ocean. But when he heard about the opening at the RNC last spring, he was ready to make a change.

"Don't get me wrong, I didn't want to leave Santa Monica," Krohn says. "But ever since 9/11, I've always wanted to do something for the country, and for my party. My thinking was: If I could actually help the party through my experience with technology, then why not? What am I doing helping Democrats win the White House if I could be helping my own party?"

Within a few weeks, he packed his family, moved back East and wrote an e-mail to friends and colleagues with the subject line "Goodbye Yahoo, Hello White House?"

His wife of 12 years, Jennifer, thought "it was nuts." "But I've learned to believe in his career decisions," she says.

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Krohn's first priority for the six staffers in the eCampaign division was revamping the RNC's main site, GOP.com. A good site, he says, is like a buffet. "There's gotta be something for everyone." He has two groups to serve: an older audience that just wants to find information, and a younger one that expects to interact with the content. After the revamped site's launch, he turned his attention to the grass-roots-centric portal MyGOP, the RNC's answer to the Democratic National Committee's PartyBuilder.