A Few More Thoughts

Scott has already covered many of the highlights of our first 20 years. I would add just a few more.

1. Scott and I have been writing together since, as I recall, 1990. It isn’t easy to sustain a partnership of any kind for more than 30 years; most of the credit goes to Scott.

2. Paul Mirengoff joined the site in August 2002 and contributed greatly to the site for nearly 20 years.

3. One highlight that Scott didn’t mention was being invited to dinner at the vice president’s residence in DC by Dick and Lynne Cheney in early 2005. It was an evening we will never forget.

4. As Scott wrote, it was 20 years ago this weekend that I set up the original site on Blogger. I was in our kitchen and had gone through the various Blogger steps, but couldn’t come up with a name for the site. At that moment my oldest daughter, then 13, walked into the kitchen with one of her good friends. They asked what I was doing; I said I was setting up a web site, but couldn’t think of a name for it. My daughter asked what kind of a site it would be, and I said we would be doing commentary on politics and current events. My daughter’s friend thought for a moment, and said, “Why don’t you call it Power Line.” I liked the idea: multiple references and a masculine feel. I typed in “Power Line” as the name of the site and hit the Publish button.

5. As Scott recounted, I was a little more optimistic than he was about our chances of getting readers. But I didn’t foresee what actually happened: currently, we have had somewhere between 1.3 billion and 1.4 billion page views since 2002. Traffic has grown pretty consistently through the years. 2020 was our highest traffic year ever. It was down a little in 2021, as is usual after a presidential year.

6. Wherever we have gone around the country, we have met people who know us from Power Line and consider us friends. We can’t count the number of such encounters we have had over the years, but they have kept us going for 20 years, and keep us going still.

SCOTT adds: I thank John for his kind words and join him in his acknowledgement of Paul’s contributions to the site over the past 20 years.

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