Palin's lack of articulateness may not mean she is unintelligent but it means she cannot share her intelligence in communication. To be persuasive, therefore she has to resort to rhetoric and bullying, or flirting.

I suspect there is actually a good deal of coupling between intelligence and articulateness within the set of people exposed to a sophisticated language and a body of literature and science.

She abuses words in a way that makes her thinking look stupid even if it is not, and one would expect her to be smart enough, if she were smart, not to do that.


A