Press release
MICKEY KAUS BRINGS KAUSFILES BLOG TO NEWSWEEK.COM
New York – Blogger and recent U.S. Senate candidate Mickey Kaus has joined Newsweek and will be posting his pioneering political blog “kausfiles” several times a day on Newsweek.com, Newsweek announced today.
“I’m very happy to be at Newsweek, a great magazine filled with talented people and friends with whom I’ve worked twice before,” Kaus said. “I look forward to mixing it up in the coming debates during a difficult time for the country.”
For decades, as a journalist, blogger and recently, a political candidate, Kaus has defended a political space on the conservative, or “neoliberal” side of the Democratic party. He fought for Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform and against George W. Bush’s 2007 “comprehensive” immigration reform, which he regards as an unwise amnesty. He’s a skeptical supporter of “Obamacare.” He helped break the recent John Edwards scandal despite receiving near-unanimous opprobrium from the Democratic “netroots” blogosphere.
“Basically I write about what I feel strongly about, which is the blog’s strength and also its weakness,” Kaus said. “I don’t try to cover every topic. Readers know I won’t waste their time unless I think I have something to add.”
“We’re thrilled that ‘kausfiles’ is coming to Newsweek.com,” said Newsweek Managing Editor Dan Klaidman. “Mickey’s original voice and evidence-based analysis will inspire many and, no doubt, irritate others. But his ability to intelligently challenge the conventional wisdom will provoke everyone who reads him to think in new ways about politics and policy.”
Kaus’ blog, which blends policy analysis and horse race coverage with personal asides (and occasionally cultural and automotive coverage) received an award from the Online Media Association in 2005 in “special recognition” of its ongoing contributions.
Kaus has written about public policy since 1978 – for The New Republic, Newsweek, Slate and The Washington Monthly, among other places. He has also been an editor at Harper’s and The American Lawyer. He’s the author of The End of Equality (first published in 1992 by Basic Books). The book is an argument about how to pursue the traditional American ideal of social equality when incomes are growing inexorably more unequal. It was a co-winner of the 1992 Washington Monthly Political Book Award and is still in print. In 1994 and 1995 he co-wrote The New Republic’s flagship TRB column.
In 1998, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Kaus began writing the blog-like “Chatterbox” column for the online magazine Slate. In the summer of 1999, he started his own Web site, kausfiles, and formally began what we now know as a blog on the site. It was one of the first political blogs in existence. In 2002, he moved the blog to Slate.
In 2005 he helped Robert Wright found bloggingheads.tv, a video debate site run by Wright that is currently excerpted by the New York Times.
In 2010 he quit Slate to run in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate from California against incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer, primarily to argue against the excessive power of labor unions in the party and against the premature legalization of illegal immigrants. The kausfiles blog moved to his campaign site, where it has stayed until now.
Kaus is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and clerked for Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court. He was speechwriter to Sen. Ernest Hollings in the 1984 presidential campaign, and while at Newsweek covered the 1988 presidential campaign. He currently lives in Venice, California, “where the two Americas meet.”