I want to thank everyone for the great, touching, funny recollections about TPM’s first 18 years. TPM started 18 years ago with this post about the Florida recount. I was just on an editorial call and one of my colleagues pointed out that the post begins as though it is part of a continuing conversation, one in an on-going series of installments. “As if things couldn’t get any weirder, did you notice the name of the lawyer who made the Republicans’ unsuccessful arguments before that federal judge today?” Here we are in another Florida recount, almost as vexed. The lawyer was Ted Olson, who now just signed on to sue the White House on behalf of CNN and Jim Acosta. Things repeat but transform utterly. And to the question? No, that wasn’t the case at all. This was the beginning and there was no storyline or running conversation that preceded it.
This point had never really occurred to me even though I’ve read that post countless times. Was I picking up from something I’d written previously? Pretty clearly no since there was nowhere I could have written it, or written it in that voice. I had no answer.
In retrospect, I had anticipated starting TPM a few times. Seven or eight months earlier I’d done a blog-like series of installments for the website of my then-employee, The American Prospect. But, at least it’s my recollection that it got shut down or frowned upon for too loose a language. Election night 2000 I used my own personal website to host predictions from other friends who were political journalists about the outcome of the election. I was eager to start something.
But when TPM got started it was actually the Monday after the election. I was staying with my then-girlfriend in New Haven, where she was a student at Yale Law School. This was supposed to be some down time after the election. So that day I just started it, picked up a running conversation that was a way I wanted to write but hadn’t found a venue to make it possible.
I like to focus on the future and not the past. I tell myself this and sometimes I tell others. So anniversaries or commemorations always feel pleasant but also a touch risky or uncomfortable. So I liked – just thinking about this old thing now in a new way – that TPM began positing a past that didn’t exist and imagining it into existence. Imagining an audience too, which similarly didn’t exist.
This is how I hope the endeavor will continue.
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