Michael Gerson, longtime NewsHour commentator, dies at 58

Ruth Marcus, Columnist, The Washington Post:

Well, I hope it's not rare. And I'm not sure these days that we're at the ends of the political spectrum, and maybe that explains some of it.

But we disagreed profoundly and fundamentally about all sorts of questions about how government should act, when government should act. We could disagree about tax policy. We could disagree about foreign policy.

But there were two really important ways in which we agreed. The first was about the ends. And this picks up on what David was talking about in terms of Mike's work on PEPFAR. We agree that the role of government and that the — more important, that the ends we're striving for as a society, was to lift up the downtrodden, to help those least fortunate, to provide for equality, to ensure the dignity of all human beings.

We just disagreed about the means to get there. But the other fundamental way in which we agreed was that the way to get there was to take the high road, to not belittle others, to not demean others, to not cast doubt on people. You could disagree with people's views without disagreeing with and undermining and attacking their motives and their honesty and decency.

And so that actually made it very easy to be Michael's friend and Michael's colleague and Michael's editor, because how could you not respect somebody — two things — who had such fundamental, enduring, manifested moral values, and, also, I just have to say, somebody who just wrote like an angel?

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