The Texas Blue: 2007's Most Popular Posts

2007 is quickly coming to a close, and with that comes The Texas Blue's first birthday. Over this past year, we have covered a broad array of topics touching both Texas and national politics. We'd like to take a moment to highlight the themes that you made most popular over that time.

• Our running coverage of the 2008 Senate race has been a consistently popular topic here on the Blue. We kicked everything off with one of our inaugural pieces analyzing Cornyn's potential vulnerability in '08, in a piece picked up by the Washington Post. We then broke the code on Kos' "mystery candidate," revealing that it was Rep. Rick Noriega that Kos had in mind with his draft movement, and interviewed the Representative shortly before he declared his official candidacy. And we published some of the earliest information examining Mikal Watts' candidacy in what became the most read story on the Blue this year.
• Also among one of our most-read pieces was our analysis on the role of money in statewide Texas campaigns in 2006, looking at the efforts taken by the statewide campaign of David Van Os as an illustrative example for the need for money in politics, the proper role of a nascent state party organization, and the limits on the effectiveness of a political message that come from the inability to effectively spread that message due to the lack of funds to reach large numbers of Texans efficiently. This article led to a dialog with David Van Os, and to an interview with him shortly afterward where he voices his side of the issue.
• We've done a slew of liveblogs here at the Blue. Most were coverage of Democratic presidential debates, which we covered all of. But the most popular, understandably, was the coverage of the contentious Speaker's race in the Texas House that saw Tom Craddick hold the position against a determined insurgence that was sick of Craddick's dictatorial style by way of some last-minute wheeling and dealing — an outcome that an overwhelming number of House members, both Republican and Democrat, would come to regret later in the session when Craddick effectively ruled that the Speaker could not be removed from his office once elected.
• And finally, though two interviews have been mentioned already, our "Who's Blue" audio interview series also includes a number of other fascinating figures in Democratic politics, both statewide and across the nation. Some of the more notable interviews have been with four-star Army General and 2004 presidential candidate Wesley Clark, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean, and current presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.

Thanks, everyone, for making our first year a great one!