The Daily Dish catches a perfect example of Sarah Palin-inspired media management tactics in action:

"[Your producers] did not tell me that you were going to grill me for this specific information that I was not ready to give to you tonight," - Texas representative Debbie Riddle, upset that Anderson Cooper dared to ask her for any evidence behind her claims that "terror babies" exist.

More than I've ever seen before, Republican politicians seem to believe they have a God-given right to know exactly what questions they'll be asked when they do interviews. They seem to think that a reporter is biased if he or she asks them any question for which they do not have a snappy, Palin/Twitteresque answer. So they hope to control the media, using Palin's tactics of attacking the people asking them the questions that they don't want to answer.

Certainly part of the reason they don't like challenging questions is that frequently they aren't all that bright (see Palin, Ken Buck, or Sharron Angle.) But a bigger part of it is that their views really are out-of-step with most Americans and when asked about them in uncontrolled settings -- basically, outside the bubble -- things tend to go very wrong for them. Just ask Rand Paul about his Rachel Maddow interview.

But as bad as it looks when they publicly talk about stuff that they want to keep inside the bubble, they know it would look like they were hiding something if they did no interviews at all. So what you end up with is a bunch of candidates who try to set rules with reporters to make it appear that they are being open, when they really have no intention of being so.

The rules aren't exact, and they are ever-changing, but they come down to this one goal: these candidates no longer just care about staying on message. When they talk in public they want to stay outside the bubble. The last thing they can afford to do is to say anything that reveals them to be inspired by Sarah Palin looniness. Unfortunately for them, you can't always get what you want. Yet, they still try. And the results can be downright hilarious.