The How and Why of The What For

The rationale behind the regular writing

Six weeks ago today, I launched “The What For” as a recurring column on Substack. Fourteen columns later, an audience is coming together – and for that, I’m grateful to you.

This weekend famed Washington journalist Chris Cillizza, author of So What, listed The What For as one of “13 great Substacks you need to check out.” It’s in high cotton too, at #8 on the list, sandwiched between Strength in Numbers by data journalist G. Elliott Morris and Convulsions, by Ron Fournier, one of the true deans of political journalism.

I’ve enjoyed bantering with Ron as a source over the years about national politics, and now I rarely miss one of his Substack newsletters. You should check out Convulsions and drop in a subscription. You’ll also want to check out So What on the regular.

If you’re new to The What For, you may not know how I got here. So why did I commit to the regular assimilation of thought in a venue where you, the reader, can hold me accountable? That story goes back to 1984.

As a high school freshman I found myself below the cut line from the school basketball team. Distraught, I got a surprise phone call the next day from the publisher of the newspaper in our East Tennessee county of 45,000 people. “I’ve been told you can write and that you suddenly have some time on your hands,” he said – having been tipped by his next-door neighbor, a coach.

A Tennessee Press Association pass with my name typed on it, a skinny notebook and a roll of black-and-white ILFA film turned young me into a credentialed journalist overnight. Dispatched to a couple of middle school basketball games, and within a week, to low-stakes high school contests, I thought I was big time.

As a 14-year-old, my parents had to cart me around to events, then drive me into town to turn in my stories, written in long-hand on legal pads, by midnight for editing and type-setting in that pre-internet era. I made $10 per story, plus mileage, so my parents were losing money – but they were buying an education in responsibility and deadline writing for their teenaged son. The bug bit.

Eventually I got a raise to $15 a story and a promotion to write features and cover ju-co sports. I wrote an occasional column, and built a portfolio varied enough to get hired during my college years by a major metropolitan daily, The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal, where I was a stringer, full-time summer writer and substitute copy editor – at guild wages, which paid the rent and covered my beer tab, too.

The University of Missouri’s first-and-finest journalism school in the world was my destination after undergrad and while completing a Master’s there, I was a working political journalist at the state capitol and for a short time, in Washington, DC.

The hardest job I had in journalism was writing a regular news analysis column, and the itch has never left me, even after 30 years on the other side of the fence in politics, making campaign ads and doing strategy for U.S. Senators, governors, Congressmen and a few presidential campaigns.

The lingering impulse to try and jam a coherent thesis, exposition, and conclusion into 900 or so readable words led me to place guest columns over the years in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, USA Today, CNN.com, Fox.com, The Spectator, Politico, Roll Call, The Hill and many other places. (a few oldies-but-goodies are linked, if you’re bored.)

Despite the internet’s boundless real estate and publications’ need for cheap quality content to hold eyeballs, it’s gotten harder to place guest columns, even for proven producers. Shopping a piece can take a week, editing a few more days, and before you know it, my pieces – provided for free, or close it – are expensive to me in time. It’s a minor one of a long litany of symptoms of what ails commercial journalism today. Lucky for all of us a viable alternative has emerged: Substack.

Independent journalism is changing America’s information infrastructure. You’ve already seen Substack serve as the spine for The Free Press, by Bari Weiss, the most exciting new publication of national-scope in a decade. It’s enabling career journalists like Fournier, Cillizza, and Salena Zito to create more content, quicker, in an uncluttered venue. And it’s given a platform for latent journalists like me who have front-row seats and backstage passes to the highest levels of politics to write analysis that audiences cannot otherwise get, produced a timely manner.

My diagnosis of national affairs starts from an ideological perspective – I’m a conservative, an old-school mountain Republican who had a populist understanding before it became fashionable, with years of study and data work on realignment. If you’ve read my old columns, seen me speak to corporate audiences, or thumbed through The Great Revolt, the book I wrote with Zito in 2018, you already know this. If you see me in my side gig as a CNN Commentator several times a week, you also know I call balls and strikes on what’s happening in real time.

My goal is to look for connections between disparate data points, to ask overlooked questions, and to push on the soft spots of the conventional wisdom in politics. I also use my Substack real estate to tell a few non-political slice-of-life stories that need sunlight and air. I hope you enjoy both kinds of columns, and that you’ll drop in my chat every once in a while to let me know what you like and don’t like.

Read on, y’all.