I’ve started and stopped and rewritten this post in my head many times since I heard the news yesterday afternoon. I was a fan of Tim Russert, and I cannot believe that we’re going to finish this presidential race without him. My wife and I miss it every now and then, but in our house, we ask each other,”who’s on Russert this morning?” The show may be called “Meet the Press,” but he was the show. When my son was born during his show on a Sunday morning last year, we joked, “ah, good, he arrived in time so we can catch the second half of Russert.”

When he interviewed candidates and moderated debates, there was a higher probability that news would be broken than with any other interviewer. When he knew his guest had started evading, he often would get this full-cheeked grin and pursue with glee and vigor. (“But when you said the Iowa Caucus was dominated by special interests, which interests did you have in mind?”) There aren’t a lot of news interviewers who inspire good Saturday Night Live characters, but Russert’s dogged, relentless style required Darrell Hammond to only exaggerate a little to create this memorable, semi-crazed persona.

And there was nothing better than watching some presidential candidate get confronted with a long-forgotten quote calling New Hampshire inbred syrup-pushing hicks or what have you, weeks before the New Hampshire primary. In a world with brief press availabilities and softballs and appearances on late night television and The View, an interview with Russert, where he brought up some long-forgotten act or comment that his guest wished had remained undiscovered, was as close as we got to watching a candidate react to an unexpected crisis.

He was the one who brought up the driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants question to Hillary Clinton, the first major stumble on her ultimately unsuccessful campaign. The man was so dedicated he did research into the background of Mike Gravel and offered him a tough question of his own, a sense of fairness that even the longshots deserved tough questions. (Gravel promptly insisted that “stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills and they deserved it because I used the money… to finance the empowerment of the American people.”)

There are excellent mainstream journalists out there, but none of them have reached the point where their questioning and scrutiny is so intense, it becomes a presidential primary in and of itself, the way an hour on Meet the Press became, “the Russert Primary.”

I never got to meet him, and wish I could. The man loved his job, loved journalism, and it showed every time he was in front of a camera. Fifty-eight years is way too young to depart this earth, but he sure made the most of the time he had.

Somebody is going to have to take over Meet the Press, and I’m sure that person will inherit the great research staff. Hopefully that person will rise to the occasion and put their own signature of excellence on the program. But we’ll never see another Tim Russert.