Of course, it's more difficult to get at, given a preference
for low attachment. "Low attachment" is a technical
term in psycholinguistics ... compare the following kinds of
structures.
I hope DU interprets blank spaces as blank spaces and not null
characters. Note that I'll ellipt parenthetical statements.
I'll put numbers in parentheses to explicate the trees I'll
draw. I'll also fudge messy syntactic bits like opening with
a topicalized free relative and having traces (if you buy GB
theory), and just deal with large syntactic chunks.
I'll also use an old fashioned way of looking at
"and", and treat it as just a linking element
between two equal phrases. * = ungrammatical or ill-formed.
"What I would do, also, if that were ever to happen,
though, is to continue the good work he is so committed to of
putting government back on the side of the people and get rid
of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in
Washington."
1.
*What (1) I would do ... is
(2) to continue the good work (3)he is so committed to of (4)
putting government back on the side of the people and (5) get
rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in
Washington.
(1)
|
(2)
|
(3)
|
and
/ \
(4) (5)
Note how simple the tree is. Every complement (object of verb
or preposition or of "and") is neatly attached to
what comes immediately before it; and what comes immediately
before it is always lower in the tree--it usually attaches to
the lowest thing it can attach to. "And" is an
exception--it doesn't attach to "people", the
appropriate phrase isn't "people and get rid of"
where a noun and a verb are joined, so the listener/reader
gets to search for what it can attach to, what "and"
can link. For that you need two verbs, or at least two like
things. The closest place that allows linking like things is
whatever kind of thing you think "committed to" has
as its complement--certainly they're nouns of some sort, not
tensed verbs. So McCain is "committed to (1) putting ...
AND (2) get rid...." Since "and" would require
both elements linked to be tenseless deverbal nouns,
"get" (which looks like an infinitive, also
untensed) must be an error with "getting" the
intended form. McCain would then be committed to
"putting ... and getting rid of...."
But that requires asserting that the sentence is ungrammatical
because there's no grammatical reading. A decent heuristic
showing a bit of humility and good will is to assume that the
sentence is grammatical and look higher in the tree to see if
there's a reading that makes sense. (These things, humility
and good will are, of course, problems--so it's a good thing
that they're largely erased from American political discourse.
But humor me.)
Is there a second reading? Sure.
2.
What (1) I would do ... is to
(2) continue the good work (3)he is so committed to (4) of
putting government back on the side of the people
AND
(5) get rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in
Washington.
In this reading, we need two infinitives, which, by definition
(in English at least) are tenseless. Stylistically you can
drop the "to" before the second one. "Today I
want to go to the store and visit my mother" sounds much
better to my ears than "Today I want to go to the store
and to visit my mother," although the latter is more
pleasing to the eye.
But if we assume that we're talking infinitives and not verbal
nouns, where could "and" find another infinitive?
That first "to" is the signal: "get"
isn't paired with "putting", but with
"continue".
(1)
\
and
/ \
/ \
(2) (5)
\
(3)
\
(4)
Palin would "continue McCain's putting-work" and
would "get rid of corruption." Fully grammatical,
although best heard, not read. There'd be an intonation
contour, in the best of all possible worlds, signalling
something about attachment, about how large a syntactic break
there is between syntactic chunks.
Stylistically, including a second "to" after
"and" is all but necessary when writing. It might
be nice when speaking, too, but I'm open on the question.
Lots of things I've read which looked horrible and struck me
as gibberish came across as quite nice and easily intelligible
when I consulted the recording, a good example of the primacy
of spoken language in linguistic analysis. In any event, this
was spoken, not written. I suppose I should consult the video
in this case to check for pauses and intonation, but the
reason I had to write "in teh best of all possible
worlds" is that speakers not infrequently leave them out.
Now, we can easily argue that the VP position isn't the best
one to hold "to get rid of corruption" on Wall
Street ... or for remedying health care or working on
environmental concerns, for that matter. Only after showing
that she couldn't mean that would we be have shown that the
second reading is impossible, leaving us with a choice--she
either intended for the sentence to have no meaning or she
intended for it to have the meaning in (1). If she intended
the meaning in (1), we're left with its being ungrammatical. 
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