Coming days after the event and then shrouded in what literary critic Walter Gibson once identified as the “stuffy,” official language of bureaucrats and Fourth of July picnic speakers, it is not only curiously dispassionate but vague and legalistic (filled with barely earned conclusions prefaced with “so,” “thus,” etc.). It is a tapestry of threadbare cliches (“our Founders’ genius,” “May God bless America,”) in search of a news hook, the type of windy oraration that could be dusted off for any event, from a disaster site to a Kiwanis luncheon. And if the style is what captures the reader’s attention, it’s because there’s no substance on which to feed…

But since her bravura entrance onto the national stage, virtually every interaction she has had with her public has been so tightly stage-managed and scripted that her main selling point has been swathed and suffocated in layers and layers of distance from anything approaching a real-time response to the world she lives in. When she resigned her governorship long before her first term was up, she signaled that she wasn’t so interested in being an actual legislator. Fair enough, and who can blame her? But she’s now getting to the point where she’s signaling that she is incapable of giving even her most sympathetic audience what it wants from her. Which means there’s one less interesting character on the public stage and her future, even as an entertainer, is dimmer than it once seemed.