Kevin Drum obit

Kevin Drum, R.I.P.

 

He was not on the list.

The polite, liberal, fact-driven blogger Kevin Drum died last Friday. Drum battled cancer in his final years and posted this ominous health update just a few days ago. I was often grateful for his narrative-deflating observations.

Kevin was one of the original bloggers when that word — blog — indicated genuine intellectual curiosity and good-faith interaction. He was acutely conscious of suburban life and California issues, and I’m grateful for his work throughout the years.

Drum initially rose to prominence through the popularity of his independent blog Calpundit (2003–2004). He later was invited to launch another blog, Political Animal (2004–2008), for the Washington Monthly. He held a writing and blogging position at Mother Jones from 2008 to 2021, before returning to independence with his Jabberwocking blog.

Drum was born in Long Beach, California on October 19, 1958. He graduated from Pacifica High School in Garden Grove, California, and then attended Caltech for two years before transferring to California State University, Long Beach, where he received his bachelor's degree in journalism in 1981. While at CSULB, he served as city editor of the university's student run newspaper, The Daily 49er.

After graduating from college, Drum worked at RadioShack for several years, and became a store manager in Costa Mesa, California, in 1983. He subsequently got a technical-writing job with a local technology company, becoming a product manager at Emulex. In 1992, he began working at Kofax Image Products, an Irvine, California-based supplier of application software and image processing products. In 2000 he was promoted from the position of VP for Marketing, becoming the general manager of the Ascent Software Business Unit within Kofax. In 2001, he moved to newly created position with Dicom New Ventures, the business development arm of the Dicom Group, Kofax's parent company. He quit in 2002 to become a marketing consultant; he gave that up in 2004 to concentrate full-time on writing.

Drum's blogging started in 2003, with his independent blog Calpundit. On a Friday in March, he posted a photo of his cat Inkblot as an antidote to stressful politics, thus inventing Friday cat blogging, a practice that was soon adopted by many blogs. The Washington Monthly, which wanted a blog, hired Drum in 2004 to launch Political Animal. Drum defended Hillary Clinton during her email controversy, stating that her actions were "non-scandalous", and that she is "honest to a fault when discussing policy".

Drum supported the 2003 Iraq War in its early stages. Just before the United States launched its attack, he changed his mind. He said, "Before the war started I switched to opposition on practical grounds (i.e., that George W. Bush's approach was incapable of accomplishing the goals it was meant to accomplish). Since then, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that, in fact, I should have opposed it all along on philosophical grounds: namely that it was a fundamentally flawed concept and had no chance of working even if it had been competently executed."