BlueJersey.com's Juan Melli may not even be a real politician. He takes his ideology seriously, he's summa smart, and he derives absolutely no financial benefit from his involvement in New Jersey politics. This year, the 26-year-old Gloucester County native has emerged as the Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of New Jersey, and that's what makes him PoliticsNJ.com's Politician of the Year for 2006.

It's not easy to balance an aggressive activist bent with the ability to work with the established politicos, but Melli and the folks at Blue Jersey, the progressive blog he started, have been able to do it. The online presence is often caustic and pointed, and willing to take on powerful Democrats like Sen. Bob Menendez after his fall vote to authorize wiretaps without warrants, or to ridicule Governor Jon Corzine for flip-flopping on property tax reform. But Melli is able to tap fellow Blue Jersey bloggers and his own real world network to get podcast interviews with these same politicos -- including Menendez -- and get them to give blunt assessments on the record. The reason is that Melli is always fair and unwilling to go after someone unless it is deserved, and politics watchers, from the most radical activist to the most entrenched politicos, know it.

PoliticsNJ also explains the conversation taking place in this pic of Juan & U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12), which is apparently NOT about how to best grapple stuffed animals.

What is summa smart? Melli will get his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University this spring. His research interests include computer modeling of fish-like swimming and control and gait-generation for fish-like bodies. At the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Germany last year on Dynamical System Methods in Fluid Dynamics, he won an award for Motion Planning for an Articulated Body in a Perfect Fluid. How many New Jersey pols, besides Rush Holt, get that kind of stuff?