Inarticulate? Evasive? America!

During the vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin was asked twice if she wanted to respond to Joe Biden’s accusation that the subprime mortgage crisis was attributable to the deregulation that John McCain and other Republicans had actively supported since George Bush took the White House. She chose at each moment to respond, though never to the question or Biden’s preceding argument.

The initial question was oversimplified enough to give Palin a fair shot at not sounding like a hockey mom. “Now, let's talk about…the subprime lending meltdown. Who do you think was at fault? I start with you, Governor Palin. Was it the greedy lenders? Was it the risky home-buyers who shouldn't have been buying a home in the first place?” It was one or the other, and Palin didn’t hesitate: she knew exactly who was to blame. “Darn right it was the predator lenders… There was deception there, and there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that.” There ended Palin’s explanation of the causes of the crisis: it was greed and it is corruption. And a McCain-Palin administration will bring about an end to both when Jesus rides in on a magic Lisa Frank pony and cockslaps Greed and Corruption right in their faces. Question answered!
As Palin clenched her jaw to demonstrate the resolve of her response, Joe Biden went on to talk about deregulation as a cause of the crisis. He added that McCain supported similar deregulation of the health care industry and contextualized the issues with an anecdote about the pocketbook struggles of a guy he met at a gas station named Joey Danco (Guido? I hope so.).
Palin was asked to respond to Biden’s charges, so she avoided them and talked about lowering taxes. Her tactic wasn’t that big of a surprise; politicians evade questions all the time, and, to be fair, Joe Biden had mentioned taxes and further weakened the focus on the mortgage-crisis issue by mentioning a Guido. But Palin’s previous comments had run so far away from the original topic that she realized she should probably back up her Lisa Frank pony (named Maverick) a little bit and get back to those predator-lenders. But instead she justified her digression: “…I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.”
None of Palin’s other sentences, or any of her fragmented accumulations of predicates without subjects, better sums up Sarah Palin’s take on political discourse. She’s not going to play along with Gwen Ifill and Joe Biden; she’s gonna abortion that discourse and speak about whatever she thinks will reach the lowest common denominator of voters.
She’s a governor! She is smart and she wears glasses and she majored in Communications and she’s going to communicate America to ourself! She will speak to America and if you challenge her answers then she will obliquely refer to you as high-minded and Washington as Usual, because that is what’s wrong with America!
Sarah Palin evades questions not just in content, but also in form – that form being Washington-as-Usually conceived English. When asked to speak to America’s income disparity, Joe Biden said that an Obama-Biden administration would eliminate the Bush tax cuts for those that make more than $250,000 in order to redistribute America’s wealth to the middle class. Governor? “I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you.” Do you see it now? She doesn’t communicate in the language of the Old Boys’ Network, but rather with the expressionist English of the Last Frontier, where grammar doesn’t matter much! Then, when she really wanted to convey that Joe Biden was wronger than her, she spat out a pronoun that disagreed with its DC-insider antecedent, alluding to the possibility that tax cuts were going to physically manifest themselves into a maverick: “A $5,000 health care credit through our income tax - that's budget neutral. That's going to help. And he also wants to erase those artificial lines between states so that through competition, we can cross state lines and if there's a better plan offered somewhere else, we would be able to purchase that. So affordability and accessibility will be the keys there with that $5,000 tax credit also being offered.”

Maybe I’m nitpicking her grammar. After all, I still understand that Tax Credits - which aren’t even enough to buy a comprehensive insurance plan for those in the lower-middle class not covered by Medicaid – and Reform of the Republican executive branch by newer Republicans are going to save the country. But perhaps the Republicans realize that Palin’s particular form of speech has a way of making us forget what we were talking about when it actually matters.
When Katie Couric asked Palin whether climate change was man-made, Palin responded that, “There are man’s activities that can be contributed to, uh, the issues that we’re dealing with now with these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate, because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical and over history, we have seen changes there, but, um, it kind of doesn’t matter at this point…” Gwen Ifill thought it would be a good idea to pick Palin’s brain about the topic one more time. “What is true and what is false about what we have heard…about the causes of climate change?” Palin: “I'm not one to attribute every man -- activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man's activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don't want to argue about the causes.” Very good: we can’t blame all of man’s activities on climate change, but we can avoid the question by villainizing climate change as an agent working to fuck up man’s activities. QUESTION EVADED!
Palin's responses don’t often seem to respond directly to questions, but I don’t think that her answers indicate her inadequacy as a communicator or an intention to evade the issues. I suspect, rather, that Palin’s speech is heavily influenced by Harold Pinter and the notion that language sketches a space around which meaning can be felt, perhaps as Joe's identity is best understood as the negative space of his six-pack. By repeating some of the words in a question and then throwing in a little ‘reform’ or ‘maverick’, we get a sense of what Sarah Palin isn’t. She isn’t a politician that is going to answer someone’s questions just because someone is a debate moderator. She isn’t going to stand for press conferences that ask her about policies when they could be asking her how she plans to metaphorically water the Chia Pet that is the American economy. Rather, she will listen to what you say, make her “I’m thinking real hard” face, and then repeat the words that John McCain’s press team played for her on a cassette tape while she slept.

Am I making sense to yourself? Have I mavericked you?

Voici Alaska.