Andrew Sullivan marks his 10th year of blogging and he has asked for a “toast or roast.” We’ll give a decided Toast.
The reason: Andrew Sullivan and his The Dish has been engagingly consistent every step of the way and the Internet remains richer for it. Sullivan has been and is a role model to many who wanted to blog and I know I can safely say he is one of the favorites of many of the writers of varying viewpoints who regularly write for or Guest Voice on TMV.
One complaint you now hear about how this Internet infooutlet called a “weblog” has now evolved is: many political political blogs and can be relied on to have posts that seemingly echo the words uttered by a Rush, or a Sean, or a Glenn, or a Keith or a Rachael or another top left or right blogger. Not so with Andrew Sullivan. He marches to his own drummer which often has a passionate beat. A pioneer of blogging, he has gone through various stages of evolution– and on-line political emotions — to reach the kinds of posts he does today.
The highest compliment you can say in a nutshell is: while like most of us on some issues Andrew makes his perception clear, the bottom line is you never really know anymore when Sullivan will make a course correction or give you an “on the other hand” rather than a ideological poke in the eye. He’s a self-proclaimed conservative who won’t go along with a changing definition of conservatism. It’s not like you’re reading a cyberspace talk show when you read his site. You’re reading someone’s best take analysis. And whether you agree or disagree you get it concisely, smack right between the eyes. He also is a practitioner of the seemingly dying art on blogs (perhaps some day someone will explain why) of linking to other bloggers. On many blogs these days the only links are to blogs that they totally agree with or that they want to blast. Sullivan will link to someone he disagrees with sometimes strongly, sometimes slightly. But you’ll see links that take you somewhere.
I’ve read Sullivan I started tinkering with blogging to renew the writing that I had done for a long time on newspapers but had stepped out of for a while. I didn’t even know a thing blogs (and some will say I still don’t) until I started reading a few in December 2003. And Sullivan one of the first. He can say more in a short post than most and he can give you a CostCo sized arguments to ponder in a long, well thought out long-form post.
If Twitter doesn’t totally gobble up the energy and attention that used to be funneled mostly into weblogs by many, I expect Sullivan will remain at the top of the list of blogs that people of varying opinions NEED to read, upset those who thought they disagreed with him earlier, please those who angrily felt he differed with them before — and will remain a role model.
Sullivan has shown that you can be both thoughtful and highly passionate — a mix that we often see missing on various political fronts these days.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.