by Robert P. Heslin, for Touchdowns.com

On October 5th, the day Steve Jobs died, Sarah Palin announced on Mark Levin's radio show that she would not run for President in 2012. Her decision came as a shock to many of her supporters, capping as it did a summer of anticipation fed by a series of events – bus tours, political speeches, a full-length movie – that at times bore a striking resemblance to a presidential campaign.

As always, controversy and speculation swirled heatedly around her. On web sites such as Organizing4Palin and Conservatives4Palin, fans and detractors engaged in a war of narratives around her intentions. Would she run? Was she running already? How long could she or would she wait before declaring? Or would she be content to reprise her 2010 role as kingmaker in a rising conservative tide that had swept the American body politic?

Through the many twists and turns of her public odyssey – her television interviews, her magazine features, and the mounting pressures of what was widely seen as an incipient presidential run – she adhered stubbornly to her stock reply to media inquisitors. No, she hadn't decided yet about running for president. She was still thinking it over.

Many thought her coy. Detractors who assumed she wasn't running faulted her for milking her fame for fun and profit. Of course she wasn't running, went the argument. She knew she wasn't presidential timber and she knew she could never win, even if she tried. The spotlight, in addition to being its own reward, was a way to goose her speaking fees and sales of her books; she would happily prolong the will she/won't she charade as long as she could.

Supporters likewise refused to take her indecision at face value. But their refusals came with approval and sage nods of appreciation. What a savvy player Sarah was. Alley cat smart. As long as she remained officially undecided the media's hostility and barbed questions were aimed elsewhere, culling her political rivals for her. At some strategically opportune moment in the future she would declare and take the Republican primaries by storm.

Friend and foe were thus perversely of one mind in their disbelief of Sarah Palin's truthfulness on the central question of her political intentions – all while a radical honesty and willingness to confront political norms was a central part of her appeal.

Even now, having explicitly taken herself out of the running for 2012, controversy, much of it of a conspiratorial bent, continues to follow Sarah Palin. The most pungent speculation hints darkly of malign forces in the Republican establishment working behind the scenes to thwart her ambitions in such a way as to make their fulfillment impossible without a savage public fight of a kind no sensible Republican wishes to wage this year, lest a fatal second term be delivered to Barack Obama as a result.

Let me float another possibility – one that may seem particularly farfetched in the fantastical maze of funhouse mirrors which is American politics. It's simply this: perhaps Sarah Palin's ambivalence about running for President wasn't a pose. Maybe she really wasn't sure herself. Could it be – incredibly, against all odds – that Sarah Palin's universe of mystified onlookers included not just the American public, not just political movers and shakers, and not just professional pundits and activists, but her own family? Perhaps they didn't know. Perhaps no-one knew. Not even Sarah herself.