Kevin Drum, who gave up his day job in software marketing to write online about politics, policy and his cats, quickly becoming a key figure in the vanguard of center-left bloggers during the genre’s heyday in the early 2000s, died on March 7. He was 66.

His wife, Marian Drum, announced the death on his website but did not say where he died or cite a cause.

Mr. Drum, who lived in Irvine, Calif., had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2014 and had recently developed pneumonia. He blogged about those personal challenges openly and with the same insight that he brought to issues like health care policy and urban planning.

Neil Gostling, a paleobiologist at the University of Southampton in England, listens to these aspersions and laughs. “Eighty-three years later, the idea persists that dodos were slow, fat,fef777.com useless balls of feathers that blundered into their own demise,” he said. “The fact is that the birds were fast, agile and, before being wiped out, had been doing their thing and doing it incredibly well for about 12 million years.”

He spent most of his life in Orange County, Calif., which distinguished him from the majority of early big-name bloggers, many of whom hailed from the Washington-Boston corridor or from academic enclaves.

Mr. Drum began blogging in 2002 and quickly developed a large nationwide following. He helped shape what became known as the liberal blogosphere, populated by a broad amalgam of left-of-center thinkers who emphasized policy debates over political horse races.

His curiosity was broad, and he wrote on a variety of subjects from a variety of perspectives — sometimes casually observational, sometimes rigorously analytical — in a way that set him apart from the assorted camps that defined the blogosphere, including academics, politicos and ideologues.

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