I’m having trouble getting by the inexplicable performance of Sarah Palin last night. Or perhaps it is, that in retrospect, I can’t get by her inexplicable performances with Couric, Gibson, and others in the weeks leading up to last night’s debate. Watching her last night, I would not be surprised to find the discarded remnants of a pod next to her bed. This didn’t even seem like the same woman.

If all that was in evidence was her GOP convention speech, subsequent stump speeches and her Alaskan references, I would have expected her to perform much as she did last night. Her content was shallow, repetitive, and wonky. But she stayed on message, formed coherent sentences, and used her personality and blue collar roots to her best advantage. Not that I think this remotely makes her a rational defensible choice as VP, but the performance would have been internally consistent with her history.

Which leads me to think that the debates were not so much the surprise performance, but rather it was her interviews in the weeks previous that were the anomalies. At the end of the debate she made some remarks about her getting past the filter of mainstream media. Saying that the debate format suited her better. But I’m having trouble with the distinction. Both formats involved unscripted questions without audience reaction to play against.

Granted, the debate format allowed her more opportunity to simply ignore the question asked and make a different statement of her choice. Her interviewers were more adament that she stay on topic. That may explain away gaffes like not being able to provide specific examples of McCain’s policy or Supreme Court decisions, but it doesn’t explain her virtual inability to link up subjects verbs and objects into lucid verbal thoughts during the interviews.

It is possible that her speaking comfort zone is so narrowly defined that she just crumbles when even slightly outside it. If so, that would be a concern as a chief executive. She might give great State of the Nation addresses, but could she negotiate a treaty if she self-destructs every time she gets dragged off the script?

The other possibility, and this is maybe the paranoid part, is that this was all a grand script of its own. (In fairness, Kim originally posited this awhile back.) The GOP campaign machine is unbelievably skillful at manipulating public opinion and the media. Is it possible they intended Palin to tank the pre-debate interviews simply to lower the expectations bar going in? That seems a risky gamble on their part, but they have to recognize that the whole McCain campaign is a risky gamble. And they also clearly recognize that the people on the GOP emotional yo-yo string will happily bounce up and down for them. The debates have clearly re-energized the Palin fanatics, whose short attention spans would have already been fading had she been delivering constant solid performances. This strategy has kept Palin on the front page for weeks in a way that would not have been possible had she followed the standard VP nominee track.

Granted, this is all just speculation on my part. But this is a campaign demonstrably given to political theater. (After all, didn’t McCain just “suspend” his campaign to take a couple days to save the country?) This is not outside the realm of the conceivable. However, if true, it exhibits a level of contrived manipulation of the electorate that should give us all pause.

I’m just sayin…