As my posts indicate, I’ve been running around Ohio for the last few days, following Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton, and Michelle Obama. Since hearing the stunning news — on Laura Ingraham’s program the morning after the Democratic debate, as I drove from Cleveland to a Hillary event in Zanesville — I haven’t really had time to reflect on what I had always thought was the unthinkable prospect of National Review without William F. Buckley.

On the plane home today, I searched my laptop for “Buckley.” What came up, in my notes from stories over the years, was how many times people I interviewed brought up his name as a way of trying to illustrate something, or convince me of something, or to cite the highest possible conservative authority. Just in recent months, there was the strategist for the Thompson campaign making the case that only Thompson could give real voice to Buckleyesque conservatism. There was the chairman of the RNC quoting the “stands athwart history” line. And there was the young New Hampshire state representative, who would surely be the president of Lubavitcher Jews for Huckabee, if there were such an organization, telling me that in evaluating candidates, he hewed carefully to “the William F. Buckley/National Review principle of the most conservative person who can win.” (How he got from there to Huckabee just shows you the diversity of approaches out there.)

I also came up with my notes from a story I wrote for the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago on the history of the American Spectator magazine. Buckley, of course, was pretty much everywhere in that tale, and it showed in a small way the tremendous influence he had on college students for fifty years. In the case of the Spectator, Bob Tyrrell had founded it in 1967 while a graduate student at Indiana University. He gathered around him a small — very small — group of conservatives who all, of course, revered Buckley. They were thrilled beyond words when he agreed to come speak to them, and even more thrilled when he came to visit the Establishment, which was their name for the farmhouse outside Bloomington, Indiana where they lived, hung out and produced the magazine (then called The Alternative). But they weren’t so thrilled that they actually, you know, cleaned up the place. The rooms were a wreck and the bathroom was pretty awful, but Buckley was, of course, unruffled: “Pat Moynihan and Bill Buckley both had the same reaction when they walked in there,” one Spectator alum recalled years later. “They walked right back out and took a leak off the front porch.”

And of course, that thrilled them, too — a Buckley story of their own! It’s a wonder they didn’t put a plaque on the spot. And it would be very hard to find any other conservative, student or otherwise, who didn’t feel that same thrill if they were lucky enough to meet him.