Hazy phrasing

'Literary theorists used to say that their most abstruse prose was "writing the difficulty"—that the sentences were tortuous because there was no briskly commonsensical way of representing a complex issue. Sarah Palin, alas, talks the difficulty. She may claim, as she did in last Thursday's Vice-Presidential debate, that "Americans are cravin' that straight talk," but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor—not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest phrases, as if she were cruelly condemned to search endlessly for her linguistic home: "I do take issue with some of the principle there with that redistribution of wealth principle that seems to be espoused by you."'

 

- James Wood in The New Yorker, 13 October 2008