Sigh, Sarah Palin

I must say that this tpmtv video chronicling Sarah Palin's "greatest hits" does make one thing clear: that even during Palin's biggest gaffe in the Charlie Gibson interview, her initial confusion about the Bush Doctrine, she was almost completely in control. She looked cocky, she looked at Gibson right in the eye and her answers, even though completely short on substance, were never as cringe-inducing as the ones she gave Katie Couric.

See for yourself:



Makes one wonder what has changed in the meantime. Has the cramming become too much? Or is it just that Palin speaks much better when she wears her hair long rather than scrunching it up into a bun? I suspect the latter -- she clearly seems more comfortable wearing her hair long.

Of course one thing is also clear. CBS did a very canny thing by releasing snippets of the interview so that Palin's gaffes seem even more stretched out. What we have to realize is that most of these cringe-inducing answers happened in one seating and clearly in times like these, one error leads to another. So Palin's gaffes must be taken in this context: that she committed a gaffe, which in turn led to her losing her cool, and committing another, and another. But by looking at one gaffe at a time, each seems even worse.