Ode To TPM

I'm assuming with the 10th anniversary of Talking Points Memo quickly approaching, many progressive bloggers are going to be paying their respects to Josh Marshall and the void he has filled.  Those receiving the most attention will be Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, David Kurtz, and Dahlia Lithwick to name a few.  But there will be hundreds of lesser known bloggers who Marshall has inspired that will go mostly unnoticed during the celebration.  This blog being one of them.

TPM is the only site that I have intended to use as inspiration for blogging.  I read many others but none have garnered as much enthusiasm as Josh's.

I first came across TPM in 2004.  It was a brief visit while searching for something about the 2000 recount.  I think I was reading Too Close to Call by Jeffrey Toobin and went online to search for something about the recount and somehow ended up on TPM.  Like I said, it was brief and I only stuck around for a minute or so.  At the time I was busy myself managing a state senate race in deep south Illinois.  I had time for nothing other than campaigning.

Months later I would discover the site again.  It was one of those things I had put in the back of my mind hoping I would remember but never did.  When I found it the second time I bookmarked it.  This time it was during the 2005 GOP plan to privatize Social Security.  George Bush was fresh off of winning his first ever popular vote and his 51% mandate.  Josh and his staff of one person was instrumental at documenting nearly every single Republican quote, plan, strategy and citizen disenfranchisement taking place.  He created categories for Members of Congress labeling them the "faint-hearted faction" and so forth.  The momentum garnered from the success of the Democrats finally stopping-- for the first time-- the Bush-agenda was the beginning of their landslide elections the following year when they took back both chambers of Congress.  Marshall was the unsung hero, so he has to know what going unnoticed feels like.

Without getting too far into a bunch of boring memories, like the following year when Marshall single handily uncovered the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, what Josh brought to the web that Democrats and progressives lacked was a single talking point.  He kept Democrats on message.  He kept us focused on one or two important issues instead of the 40 taking place.  That's not to say that everyone lined up and followed whatever was being printed on TPM.  Most of the elites didn't.  But hundreds of thousands of rank and file base supporters did.  Instead of flailing on why Bush's plan was not a plan to fix Social Security but a plan to phase it out, progressives were able to read in a few minutes what was happening, why it all mattered and how to combat it.  It was a one-stop shop for staying informed.

The U.S. Attorney scandal should have brought Marshall a Pulitzer.  But the media elite would never allow it.

Today when I read TPM, I see it changing from a central talking point forum to a news-based journalistic adventure.  I'm all for the site branching in the form of original reporting but I do miss the original theme I think Josh has lost over the last two years.  I know he's been busy growing his site as visible from his shorter and shorter posts, but his direction and influence in the progressive community was monumental.  I can only imagine that the health care debate would have been much different if we would have had the TPM of 2005.  Maybe that's too unfair to Josh and his crew.  And it's not a criticism I want to lay on heavily.  But it is one I think is fair and I use it in hopes it brings them back to their original mission.

A hundred years from now, people may not use the word blog or even know what it means.  But I hope they can recall the contribution Josh Marshall provided to the early generation of web-based media and how one day, sleeping on his couch in days old clothes, one person really did change the world.