“With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.” He was 66 years old.
Kevin was one of the OG bloggers, an early, prolific, tireless member of the first wave of early 2000s writers who stuck with it for nearly 25 years.
His “Calpundit” blog introduced one of the hallmarks of that early blogosphere: cat pictures. Friday cat blogging was a low-key, charming, neighborly exercise. It was a chance to hit pause on the heated arguments about the disastrous invasions and forever wars and economic negligence of the Bush administration and take a moment to say to some feverish warblogger “Hey, that’s a great picture of your cat walking across your keyboard, mine does the same thing” and to have them reply “Aw, that cat of yours is a real cutie, you objectively pro-Saddam fifth-columnist traitor.” It was sociable social media, something Kevin seemed to believe in even long after blogs were supplanted by far less sociable formats.
Friday cat blogging might seem naive or unimportant, but it helped create an environment in which listening to opposing viewpoints was more possible. Maybe the transformation of right-wing war-blogger John Cole’s “Balloon Juice” into a stalwart of the left-of-center blogosphere would’ve happened without Friday cat blogging. But also maybe not.
Kevin Drum tended to be a bit more politically conservative than most of the other early progressive bloggers, I think mainly because he was a bit more conservative temperamentally. He was a cautious, reasonable, prudent, moderate guy to such an extent that some of the rest of us back in the day were sometimes frustrated with him. Josh Marshall describes this a bit in his lovely tribute to Kevin here:
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.
But KDrum’s innate caution and moderation also gave his arguments extra force when he really came out swinging — such as with his dogged, ground-breaking argument about the connection between crime and environmental lead poisoning. That got people’s attention in part because if Kevin Drum was saying this, you knew he’d done his homework and wasn’t jumping to any conclusions he couldn’t support or hadn’t fully thought through.
I learned many things from reading Kevin Drum’s writing for more than 20 years. One of the main things I learned was that he was trustworthy — that he meant what he said and believed it to be true because he’d done his best to make sure it was.
I never met Kevin in person. and only interacted with him a handful of times via email, comment section, or trackback. It was via trackback that we first “met,” blog-wise, when — for reasons I don’t fully remember now — I had some running gag about him apparently always wearing a tie, but not pants. I think partly I was just trying to see if I could get this earnestly serious fellow to crack a smile. Eventually, after he’d been pinged by a handful of posts in which I’d written things like “Calpundit, who does not wear pants, raises an interesting point here, saying …” he responded good-naturedly by posting a picture proving otherwise.
My few interactions with him over the years were just as many others have described: he was always kind, generous, and friendly, even when we disagreed. Disagreeing with Kevin was, in a sense, enjoyable, because it was always an honest disagreement — a good-faith difference of opinion.
Mark Evanier has a nice remembrance of Kevin here. He was a good man.
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