Former Alaska Governor Palin is taken to night school by Vanity Fair.

These edits (but not the editorial gesture, which is imaginatively partisan) strike me as honestly well-intentioned and hardly mean-spirited, akin to an undergraduate essay being marked-up by three thorough and caring teaching assistants. Lots to learn here for any politician. Hopefully Palin takes these recommendations to mind and future practice (if there must be any).

Meanwhile, current California Governor Schwarzenegger waxes thusly:

And that is why this budget is an acceptable budget to me. It saves our state from financial ruin and from drowning in the fiscal abyss. With this budget California has safely navigated the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have endured the darkest of storms and the harshest of winds. We have steered the California ship away from the iceberg. And that is the important thing here. We have emerged battered and bruised but we are intact, we are still standing.

And at the same time, it is clear that we do not know yet what the future holds. We are still in troubled waters; there are still uncertainties. We don’t know how much longer our revenues will drop. We don’t also know if we may not be back in the next six months to make further cuts.

Any copy editors at The New Republic care to weigh in? It’s like Schwarzenegger reaches for Walt Whitman (an excessive gesture, given the circumstances) but ends up with William Henley and Simon & Garfunkel.

I do give both Governors some credit though for attempting to be something other than completely boring.