The best blogger in the world, Kevin Drum, died last Friday after a ten-year journey with multiple myeloma. Though I never met him, I miss him terribly.

Kevin became the voice of the Political Animal blog at Washington Monthly in 2004–that’s where I discovered him. And while I don’t remember the first time I took notice of his work, I’ve read him daily for at least 20 years, first at Political Animal, then at Mother Jones, and finally at his solo endeavor, Jabberwocking.

Kevin’s work was so thoughtful, so insightful, so wide-ranging and funny, that sometime around 2006 or 2007 I felt inspired to start a blog of my own. I learned almost immediately how hard it is to do what Kevin Drum did every day, multiple times a day. After a few weeks of putting up meandering, useless-to-anyone-but-me musings–maybe six or seven of them in total–I realized that I would never be able to do what Kevin did. In retrospect, the feeling was a little like that scene in the movie Trainwreck where Bill Hader is playing one-on-one basketball against LeBron James: the difference between what I was trying to do and what Kevin was doing was so great that it wasn’t even clear that we were playing the same game.

And now he’s gone. I can’t think of a political commentator in my lifetime that was more fair-minded, more intellectually rigorous, more even-keeled, more decent than Kevin. For 20 years, his mind has been indispensable to me. And, while I am reminded of the Charles de Gaulle quote “the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men”–a saying I first encountered in a Kevin Drum post–I regard with loneliness the prospect that we will all have to get along without Kevin’s incomparable gift from now on.