The Michael Barone of the Puget Sound
Forgive the overly self-referential beginning to this post, but it is necessary to make my point.
These days, I read almost all weblogs through an RSS reader, something I highly recommend. There are still a few blogs I read that don’t provide RSS feeds, and those I have saved in a particular favorites folder in Firefox. As it happens, fellow Sound Politics contributor Jim Miller’s site gets opened up right next to the newish blog of US News columnist Michael Barone. This daily juxtaposition has made me realize something: Jim Miller is the Michael Barone of the Puget Sound. Unless it’s the other way around.
Both Barone and Miller write about politics, obviously, but they also both approach it from a very systematic angle: compare this post from Miller to this one from Barone, for example.
Both write from a clearly ideological, and often partisan, perspective, but do so in a remarkably evenhanded, even humble way, that is a precious rare thing in the blogosphere. As examples, consider this post from Barone, on the Democrats’ poor behavior regarding the war, and this one from Miller on “distributed vote fraud” and the Democrats. Each post tears Democrats a figurative new one, but in aremarkably gentle way. They say that tact is telling someone to go to hell and leaving them looking forward to the trip, and that’s something Barone & Miller have both mastered.
They each also enjoy a good bit of history, particularly the obscure and overlooked political kind. This includes relatively recent history –such as this post and this one–and more distant–such as this post and this one.
Now, Miller and Barone are hardly identical twins (though if Barone starts duckblogging, I’ll start to wonder), but I would argue that, among those who write about Washington State and Puget Sound politics, Jim Miller is far and away the most similar to Michael Barone. We could use more like each of them.
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January 15th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Jim Miller has always been one of my favorite reads. His posts are always thoughtful and edifying in a very low-key way. He’s a quiet star of the puget sound blogosphere.