What was most striking about the bus odyssey was the apparent relish Ms. Palin seemed to take in driving reporters nuts. While there have been numerous media-loathing politicians over the years, no possible candidate of Ms. Palin’s wattage has so blatantly blown off (or actively thwarted) the trailing press corps to the degree that she did…

We do not know if Ms. Palin was authentically “winging it” — or just giving the impression of it to burnish her freewheeling populist credibility. She is certainly capable of political calculation and personal image crafting of the highest order. Her bogey-manning of the “lame-stream media” carries obvious benefit for her among her base. Whether this can translate into a winning electoral strategy if she decides to run is another question.

But by its counterexample, the Palin Wild Goose Chase Tour served as a kind of object lesson for what the political media environment has become today. “I think that it would be a mistake for me to become some kind of conventional politician and doing things the way that it’s always been done with the media,” Ms. Palin told Ms. Van Susteren. She snickered at the custom dictating that campaigns should “orchestrate” and “script” everything for the media’s ease.

“We’ll basically write a story for you, media, about what we are doing every day,” Ms. Palin said sarcastically.