Can Sarah Buy a Verb?

From George Packer at the New Yorker:

Don’t try to scan Sarah Palin’s syntax; don’t even bother making fun of it. By now we all know that she can’t think and talk at the same time on the national stage. What interests me more is what her particular kind of incoherence reveals about her as a political figure. Palin’s sentences quickly clot up with nouns, but you can wait a long time before you’ll hear a verb. Sometimes most of a paragraph can go by without one.

Palin’s candidacy is pure identity politics—a play for Christian conservatives, women, and anyone who resents the coastal big-city know-it-alls. What does Palin offer these voters? Herself. String along a chain of nouns in the form of politically symbolic platitudes—“Hockey Mom Pitbull Joe Six Pack Wasilla Main Street Reform Soccer Mom Every Day American People Maverick”—and you have practically the whole of her program, her policies, her world view. Palin’s self-infatuation is staggering: asked any question, she describes herself, again and again. It’s the opposite of empathy and identification with others. No one with a sharp, clear image in her head of a hard-pressed American would use a term like “Joe Six Pack,” an insulting cliché on the order of “the little people.”

the whole thing, here