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" When Sarah Palin announced on Friday that she was resigning as governor, she said this about her future plans: &amp;quot;In the words of General MacArthur, &amp;#039;We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  She likes quotes, leans on them, both in speeches and in conversation. The first time I spoke with her, for example, we&amp;#039;d been chatting for no more than thirty seconds before she tugged out her inner Bartlett&amp;#039;s. This was shortly before Christmas last year, less than two months after election night, and I was in Wasilla, working on a story about her husband, Todd. I&amp;#039;d just told Sarah about plans Todd and I had made to go snowmobiling.  &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;you know what Plato says: &amp;#039;You can learn more about a man in an hour of play than a year of conversation.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  You certainly can&amp;#039;t learn much about Sarah Palin, or her intentions, by studying her resignation speech. It was brightly delivered, pleasant to listen to, and completely devoid of useful information. Her explanations \u2014 she doesn&amp;#039;t want to go on lame-duck international trade junkets while the press double-teams her and children all over the world suffer on other fronts \u2014 didn&amp;#039;t really make any sense, and you were left with the inescapable feeling that you, the listener, were missing some critical piece of information. Sarah Palin knows why she&amp;#039;s resigning, and what she plans to do next, but she&amp;#039;s decided that she&amp;#039;s not ready for us to know yet.  Of course, that&amp;#039;s not going to stop us from wasting a lot of digital and analog ink trying to figure her out. Her speech has already been parsed dry, every word. We now know it probably wasn&amp;#039;t Douglas MacArthur who coined that line, for example. But that&amp;#039;s about it. There&amp;#039;s no more there there.  In time, the real explanation, and her real plans, will emerge. Until then, everything else, all the noisy chatter, is useless speculation.  Todd once told me that when Sarah came to him seventeen years ago and said she was thinking about trying her hand at politics, running for a seat on the Wasilla city council, he just sort of shrugged and said, &amp;quot;Knock yourself out.&amp;quot;  Last week, in front of a small group of reporters and a worldwide audience, she did just that.  But it&amp;#039;s way too early to predict whether she&amp;#039;s out for good. RELATED LINKS:  LUKE DITTRICH: Todd Palin Is the Man for America Now  VIDEO: At Home with the Palins   WHAT I&amp;#039;VE LEARNED: Sarah Palin on the Media and Her Priorities   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6067/why-did-sarah-palin-resign-070809/>