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Biography

Mickey Kaus has been writing about public policy and politics for three decades. A longtime campaigner for welfare reform, he is author of The End of Equality, an award-winning book on rethinking liberalism.

Mickey was born in Santa Monica, California. He attended Beverly Hills High, Harvard College and Harvard Law School (where he graduated magna cum laude).  He subsequently clerked for Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court and worked at the Federal Trade Commission before switching into political journalism.

In a 1983 Harper's article, "The Trouble With Unions," he criticized the adversarial, legalistic collective bargaining system, established in the New Deal, that persists to this day. The article described many of the inefficient union practices--including the proliferation of work rules and bureaucratic job classifications--that would eventually help bankrupt GM and Chrysler, forcing a bailout by taxpayers.

In 1984, he was speechwriter in the unsuccessful campaign of Sen. Ernest Hollings for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Hollings dropped out, Mickey wrote about the rest of the campaign for the New Republic, California magazine and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. He helped cover the 1988 presidential race for Newsweek (where he co-created the magazine's popular "Conventional Wisdom Watch" feature).

In the mid-80's, Mickey began to champion welfare reform--i.e., replacing a cash dole with work. His July, 1986, The New Republic cover story, "The Work Ethic State," helped build support among Democrats for Bill Clinton's call to "end welfare as we know it." Mickey worked with reformers in Congress and the Clinton White House to promote welfare overhaul legislation, which finally passed in 1996.  The 1996 reform has been successful at dramatically reducing welfare caseloads and increasing the participation of single mothers in the labor force (where many benefitted from the good economy of the late 1990s). A disappointment has been states' failure to establish last-resort WPA-style jobs programs. 

The End of Equality, published in 1992, addresses a larger question: How to pursue the traditional liberal ideal of equality in an era when incomes are growing less equal--and nobody seems to know how to stop it without also threatening prosperity. The answer, the book argues, is to deemphasize income redistribution and pursue social equality directly--in part through government institutions, like a national health insurance system, that treat citizens with equal respect regardless of how rich or poor they are. The Washington Monthly named The End of Equality co-winner of its award for Best Political Book of 1992. 

In the summer of 1999, Mickey started his own Web site, kausfiles.com, and later that year began what we now know as a blog on the site. He soon moved kausfiles to Slate magazine's web site, where it lived happily until his Senate campaign began in March. (It's now on this site.)

In 2005, Mickey and Robert Wright launched Bloggingheads.tv a Web debate site developed and run by Wright. The idea of Bloggingheads is to get writers of differing political persuasions engaged in civil, entertaining dialogues.  It's an antidote to the mindlessly partisan echo chambers that proliferate on the Web.

Mickey's brother Stephen is an attorney in San Francisco. His father, Otto, served on the California Supreme Court. His maternal ancestors were Jewish settlers drawn to California by the gold rush, winding up in San Francisco, where they endured the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906. 

Mickey currently lives in Venice, California.