Kevin Drum is an American journalist. Drum initially rose to prominence through the popularity of his independent blog Calpundit. He was later invited to launch a blog Political Animal for the Washington Monthly. In 2008, he took a writing and blogging position at Mother Jones magazine. Drum is politically liberal, and is known for the quality of his statistical and graphical analysis. He was born in Long Beach, California and currently lives in Irvine, California.
After graduating from college, Drum worked at RadioShack for several years, becoming 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.
Blogging
Drum's blogging started in 2003, with his independent blog, Calpundit. The Washington Monthly, which wanted a blog, hired Drum in 2004 to launch Political Animal. Drum's blogging is known for offering original statistical and graphical analysis, with special attention to oil supply, especially peak oil theory and related issues. His posts on education often spark discussion. He is skeptical about flavor-of-the-month school reforms which "disappear within a few years to be replaced by some new silver bullet – and always without producing any scalable, practical, long-lasting results," while he favors increased spending on intensive, early intervention. At Calpundit, he is credited with pioneering the trend of "Friday catblogging." Drum has 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, but 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. 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."
Lead and crime
Drum has published a series of provocative blogs with evidence that suggests a link between crime and environmental lead, including the link between the decline in US crime rates and the phaseout of leaded gasoline. The theory was popularized by public health researcher Jessica Reyes and economist Rick Nevin; Drum's thesis was criticized by Jim Manzi in January 2013; Drum has continued to document new evidence in support of the theory.
Personal
In an interview with Norman Geras, Drum said that his intellectual heroes were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Edward R. Murrow and Charles Darwin. He also considers Benjamin Franklin his all-time favorite political hero. Drum married in 1993; he and his wife Marian have no children. On October 24, 2014, Drum posted that he was undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma. On October 18, 2016, he updated readers that it has been two years since his diagnosis and he is "still alive and kicking." In August 2018 he reported that his multiple myeloma remained well under control.
