The very sad news arrived this week that Kevin Drum, a liberal blogger who was one of the very first and best practitioners of the form, passed away March 7 at age 66 after a long battle with cancer. Kevin was a true pioneer, in two senses. First, when blogging became a thing in the early 2000s, he was one of the first to take up the form as an independent writer, starting the self-published CalPundit blog in 2001. Second, he was a pioneer in the sense that before that, he hadn’t even been a journalist—he’d worked at Radio Shack and in the software business.
But he built a massive following, and he did so quickly. His voice was usually calm and measured, but his outrage—at the Iraq War, at growing inequality, at the rise of right-wing echo chamber—was clear. Kevin’s success, wrote Paul Glastris this week at The Washington Monthly, which picked up Kevin’s blog in 2004, represented “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.” He later joined Mother Jones, and then in 2021 returned to working independently.
Kevin also made sure that his blog had its lighthearted moments, and the best-known of those was “Friday Cat Blogging”—a pretty much weekly feature of his entire blogging career when he posted pictures of his cats. It added a nice light touch that made his readers feel more personally connected to him and spawned many imitators. Today, The New Republic and other progressive outlets are doing our own Friday Cat Blogging, with photos below of staffers’ cats (and ex-cats), in Kevin’s honor.
—Michael Tomasky
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