Remembering Kevin Drum

Sorry to learn that Kevin Drum died. I don't know of anyone who can take his place.

Paul Glastris in The Washington Monthly:

....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....

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 okay, 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.