Remembering Kevin Drum
One day in early 2004, I called my senior editor at the Washington Monthly, Josh Marshall, with a proposition: Would he be interested in moving his blog, Talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM), which he was then writing on the side, to the Washington Monthly, and work on it full time? Josh thought for a moment and answered that he would rather keep the blog independent in the hope of making something of it, but that if I wanted a blogger for our website, I should check out the site Calpundit, written by a guy named Kevin Drum.
That turned out to be about the best advice Josh ever gave me—or himself. Josh went on to build TPM into a powerhouse political commentary and investigative site. (His coverage of Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal bureaucracy has few rivals). Kevin Drum, who joined this magazine in April 2004 and wrote our “Political Animal” blog for the next four years, would revolutionize the Washington Monthly and, to some extent, political blogging itself.
Yesterday, we got the news from his wife, Marian, that Kevin passed away on March 7 after a long battle with cancer at the age of 66. So, I wanted to share a few thoughts about my old friend and colleague.
In many tributes to him over the past 24 hours, Kevin has been called an “OG” (original gangster) blogger, meaning he was among the genre’s pioneers. That’s true, but it doesn’t quite capture the qualities that made him unique.
One was his amateur Renaissance Man mind. From its earliest days, the political blogosphere was diverse. Ideological bloggers were attacking each other in the high plane of ideas, hack bloggers pouring over polling data and election news trying to find and formulate winning messages, and academics—mostly economists but also political and social scientists—adding their wonky knowledge and expertise to the national discussion. Kevin didn’t quite fit into any of these categories. Yet he was fluent enough in all of them that he could comment on just about anything anyone else was writing that caught his attention in ways that would catch other people’s attention. With his wide range of interests, Kevin helped turn the blogosphere’s often-disparate discussions into a larger, more integrated, and engaging conversation. And he did this without a hint of pretense or pedantry.
Some writers are different in person than they are on the page. That was not true of Kevin. If you followed his blogging, you pretty much knew the man. He was what I would describe as deeply normal.
Born and raised in Southern California but with family roots in Missouri, Kevin had a Midwesterner’s plainness of manner and Show-Me State unwillingness to accept things at face value. As a young man, he was smart, gaining admission to Cal Tech, but after two years, he transferred to Cal State Long Beach, where he majored in journalism. Like many people who graduated in the recession of 1981, he had trouble landing work in his chosen field, so he took a job at Radio Shack. He became store manager and then was hired to write user manuals for a local tech company. For the next two decades, he rose through the ranks of the software industry on the marketing side and lived a comfortable life with his wife and their cat, Inkblot, in Orange County, which was then predominantly Republican.
Yet Kevin retained his journalistic urges, and in 2001, he started blogging in his spare time. Over the next few years, he built a sizeable following, partly by introducing “Friday Cat Blogging”—essentially, photos of Inkblot doing typical cat things (hunting bugs in the backyard) that presaged the coming explosion of pet-centric internet content.
When he came to the Monthly in 2004, Kevin brought his audience with him and grew it on the strength of his work ethic. Every day, he would scan the papers and other blogs and write a dozen posts on whatever subjects caught his eye. Some were tightly argued mini-essays, others a few sentences with a link. Some were reactions to breaking news, others analyses of news-relevant research papers on, say, healthcare economics or the history of counterinsurgency. Kevin had a gift for pithy, accurate, and entertaining summation of complicated material, a product of a scientific mind honed by a career in technical marketing. He loved numbers and was an early adopter of chart-making software.
Kevin identified as center-left but called himself a moderate—a word that described his politics and disposition. Much blogging back then—like social media commentary today—was driven by the writers’ emotions, suffused with hyperbole, and aimed to rile readers up. Kevin was almost exactly the opposite. Curiosity rather than outrage fueled his writing. Judiciousness and skepticism rather than self-assured know-it-all-ness characterized his prose. He had virtually no patience with the Bush administration and its combination of hubris and incompetence. But neither was he much interested in internecine battles to pull the Democrats ideologically one way or another. He understood the importance of the horse race aspects of politics, but he really cared about the nature of the underlying issues—war, inequality, crime, climate change—and sleuthing out the proper policy responses. His politics followed his policy views rather than the other way around.
He was, in other words, a near-perfect reflection of the ethos of the Washington Monthly. He was also living proof that substantive, level-headed, non-alarmist news commentary could draw a decent audience. Readers with day jobs could keep up with the news and get a reliable spin on it by refreshing “Political Animal” several times daily. Traffic to our website soared under Kevin, who left the Monthly in 2008 to join Mother Jones, and it stayed that way under his successors Steve Benen and Ed Kilgore—who, like Kevin, went on to better-paying gigs at bigger outlets.
Kevin’s success was also a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery. It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary Americans—read and respect. I never entirely understood why an even bigger outlet, like The New York Times, didn’t steal Kevin away from Mother Jones. “I seriously think he deserved the Pulitzer,” Keith Humphreys, the Stanford psychologist and blogger, emailed me yesterday about our mutual friend, “but he didn’t get it because he wrote for the ‘wrong outlets.’”
In 2014, Kevin was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer. He wrote about his disease and treatment, his remissions and relapses, with the same dispassionate precision he brought to every other subject. Though we no longer talked multiple times a week like when Kevin was at the Monthly, we kept in touch. I followed his writing at Mother Jones and then at his personal site, Jabberwocking, which he started in 2021 when the chemo and other treatments became too much for him. He continued to update his blog until a few days before he died.
In 2022, he emailed saying he would be in Washington, and I invited him to come by the office and join a crew of current and former editors for lunch. He seemed ok, a little weak, but talkative and full of well-considered opinions as always. It was a chance for the younger editors to meet a legend and for me to reconnect—for the last time, it turned out—with a dear colleague. You would think knowing about his disease and its progression would lessen the shock and sadness—and it does to some extent, but less than I would have guessed. Then again, not many of us leave this life with an audience of devoted followers and a sure place in the history of our profession. Kevin did, and that makes me smile.
