What do John McCain, Laurence Sterne, Lord Byron, and Mr. Dithers have in common?

James Wolcott wrote yesterday in his Vanity Fair blog that John McCain’s speaking style “on the page would look as dashy as a paragraph from Tristam Shandy or Byron's letters. No architecture, no sense of swell and ebb, no buildups with a payoff, no combinations of jabs, just the jabs themselves hurled willy-nilly, like Dagwood’s Mr. Dithers pacing around with an irate cloud over his head.”

Good thing the senator can rely on the rhetorical elegance of Sarah Palin.