Kevin Drum died on Friday. Many of you knew Kevin’s blog. For those who didn’t, he was one of the first well-known politics bloggers, dating back to early in the first George W. Bush administration, and he never stopped. His last post was three days before he died. He began as “Calpundit” and then took his blog in-house at a series of publications before again going independent. His passing was not a great surprise. Kevin was first diagnosed with cancer a number of years ago and recently shared with readers that as part of that ongoing battle his health had grown acutely precarious.
I never knew Kevin terribly well. As I thought about it today, I’m not sure we ever met in person. But we would exchange notes, tips, even career advice on a couple of occasions. He was one of the few people to whom I could say, figuratively if not literally, I understand what you do. Because I do it too. And it’s a very weird, idiosyncratic and personal enterprise.
The early days of political blogging were a bit like being one of those performers you see in the park — maybe a mime or a juggler or a pirate. They walk over with a bundle of trappings. Then they hunt around importuning people to be part of a makeshift audience, no time for feelings of awkwardness or discomfort. Then they perform, and it works or it doesn’t and people come or go, exhilarating or brutal. All very improvised and looking for angles and more than anything … more and more and more. Juggle not three balls but a hundred. People are hungry and they want a fix and they’re never satisfied. Lots of people tried and a few people had the mix of smarts, insight, obsession and stamina to make it work. The ones who could do it well thrived on the engagement. That’s the only way for it to work. And Kevin did.
I think more than anything I admired Kevin’s restraint and his caution. Blogging is a hustle and the incentives for hyperbole and breathlessness are endless. That makes most people easy to ignore. But Kevin — who had a whole career in the normal-person rat race before he started this — sweated the details. He had a serious mind for facts and numbers and he knew how to work with data. His posts were always overflowing with numbers and charts and levels of detail and nitty gritty I couldn’t pile into my brain because I was too scattered and unfocused. When he said something, you had to take it seriously. When he disagreed with you, you knew it was time to re-check your work. Kevin was almost all signal and very little noise. That was his defining mark.
One interest we shared was the enduring question of what caused the late 20th Century Crime Wave. Why did it start and why did it, more or less out of the blue, end? He got really into the theory that lead contamination was the driving culprit behind the whole thing, beginning with the post-War boom until the dawn of lead remediation in the early 1970s, creating a generation of subtle but, at a societal level, pronounced brain damage. He put the whole thing together in a definitive way in this 2013 piece in Mother Jones, where he was then an in-house blogger. I’d always been of two minds on the whole lead/crime thing. It really did seem to line up. But everything about my acculturation and academic training taught me to have deep skepticism about such monocausal explanations. When Kevin was convinced, I knew I had to take it seriously.
Today I noted Kevin’s death on social media and said I’d need to collect my thoughts before writing anything. I had heard he was likely at the very end of his life, but when a TPM reader broke the news to me in an email, it still hit me like a punch in the stomach. One of the commenters said that it was because of Kevin and his writing on the possible connection between lead poisoning and crime rates that he ended up studying lead and brain development. I thought to myself, there’s no better tribute than that. I’m sure there are so many other stories about how Kevin’s keen mind and curiosity touched and changed people’s lives.
He was 66 years old.
