By Luke Knipe
Arizona Daily Wildcat
November 21, 1997

Start thinking, then write

Editor:

The first time I read one of Rachel Alexander's commentaries, it was one that she wrote in defense of governor-turned-felon J. Fife Symington. I wrote to The Wildcat afterward, saying that Alexander's work "seemed of typical form for a young, freshly fermented Republican mind." And I went on to criticize her writing, citing a grammatical flaw here, and a misused word there, and basically delivering a pedantic rant on the poor quality of Alexander's prose. I felt bad afterward. I should have picked on somebody else. Every time I see Alexander's picture above a column, with her cute smile and her Hillary-esque hairband, I am reminded that Republicans are people too, and that their presense in the press, while usually small-minded and full of bad writing, is fairly innocuous.

And on Thursday, Alexander spent fourteen, moderately well-structured paragraphs reminding us that President Clinton is two-faced, that he is a liar and a good one, that he lacks integrity. She was right. I might go on to say that Clinton is a manipulative, artificial personality with sociopathic qualities and no soul. But it's all been written before, and in better form than either Alexander or I am capable of. I'm a better writer than her[sic], but I'm nowhere near the ranks of the good writers who belong to her party: columnists like Bob Tyrell and P.J. O'Rourke disparage Clinton on a regular basis, attacking his dishonesty, playing to their own, familiar crowd with rhetoric that the masses have grown tired of. Publications like The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard have circulation rates that are so small when compared with those of the more familiar components of the "liberal press" that the notion that most Republicans don't really read or write well has some statistical weight. And it is sad, not that Alexander writes like an undergraduate, but that she writes the themes of a party line that is, I'm sorry, dull.

Only a fool would deny that Clinton is dishonest (and I'll concede that Clinton himself probably would). But only a small mind would want to read such things, over and over, when there is so much else out there to read. My advice to Alexander. Keep smiling. Start thinking - and then, only then, start writing. You'd be doing the writers, and everybody else in your party a favor.

Luke Knipe
Biochemistry Freshman