Cracking The Code

Peter Suderman says that he doesn’t understand this Palin statement:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely. By comparison, the second sentence is a piece of cake. Pretty much every word in the second sentence serves a function. Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.