I wasn’t all that familiar with Safire as a commentator on political issues given that most of his career happened before I was born and during my childhood.  If I ever read any of his columns I don’t remember them.  My lone memorable experience with something Safire wrote was reading his novel, Scandalmonger: A Novel, a fictionalized (though plausible) historical story about the interactions of some of our founding fathers with pamphleteers.

People who I consider to be the ancestors of bloggers.

I read this book in early 2003, not long before I started blogging, and it was instrumental in leading me to take up this medium for political commentary.  I was aware of blogging at the time, and was reading some of the scant few political blogs in existence in that stone age of online political commentary, and saw a lot of parallels between the self-publishing pamphleteers of Safire’s novel and the self-publishers of the internet.  I saw how the pamphleteers made a difference in informing and shaping public opinion in their day and it made me want to do the same thing in my day.

So I started my own blog and six years later I’m still hard at it.

There’s not much I can say to eulogize William Safire.  My knowledge of his career and works is so narrow that I wouldn’t even be writing this if I hadn’t, by chance, picked up one of his novels one day and found in it some inspiration.

Without really knowing anything else about him, I am thankful to Safire for that.