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Pushed by his Christian religion, the type that emphasizes caring for “the least of those,” because the Bible places it, Mr. Gerson in a memoir summed up his philosophy as “a conservative respect for the establishments of household and neighborhood paired with a radical uncompromising concern for the poor and weak.”
That finally led him to the scourge of AIDS then ravaging Africa. At Mr. Bush’s course, aides developed a plan to dedicate billions of {dollars} to remedy, suggested by Dr. Fauci, a famend AIDS researcher lengthy earlier than he turned a lightning rod for as we speak’s proper wing.
On the key assembly, Mr. Bush requested Mr. Gerson what he thought. “If we will do that and we don’t,” Mr. Gerson answered, “will probably be a supply of disgrace.” Mr. Bush agreed and persuaded Congress to finance this system, which over the past twenty years has devoted $100 billion to curbing the illness.
“It’s been an enormous success,” Mr. Biden mentioned in his State of the Union handle this week, crediting Mr. Bush. “He thought massive, he thought giant. He moved.” Mr. Bush plans to make a uncommon go to to Washington on Feb. 24 for a ceremony marking the anniversary.
Mr. Gerson’s imaginative and prescient of compassionate conservatism, nonetheless, has not endured with the identical success. The assaults of Sept. 11, 2001, reworked Mr. Bush’s presidency right into a wartime administration and his determination to invade Iraq, with the ensuing casualties and devastation, dispelled any sense of a compassionate time. Mr. Gerson, who helped craft the “axis of evil” handle, by no means publicly expressed remorse for his function in promoting the struggle.
Mr. Bush returned to the theme late in his presidency, searching for immigration adjustments permitting tens of millions to remain within the nation. However he failed and actually the conservative backlash helped gas Mr. Trump’s later rise, which then reworked the occasion right into a extra combative tradition struggle motion with little curiosity within the objectives Mr. Gerson espoused. By his column in The Washington Submit, Mr. Gerson turned a passionate critic of Mr. Trump.
However they weren’t straightforward years for him. He was hospitalized for despair and in 2019, from the identical pulpit the place he was remembered on Thursday, he delivered a uncooked and weak sermon about being “stalked by disappointment.”
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