"What do you want, you little jerks?"
John McCain uses the word "jerk" freely, often with people he likes, and he had a big smile on his face when he said it.
The encounter surprised us. Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times and I had rushed the forward compartment of John McCain's campaign airplane, sitting on the tarmac in Buffalo, N.Y., Monday night, trying to chase down the hot rumor of the day, that McCain was going to announce his vice-presidential pick at a townhall meeting Tuesday in Rochester, N.H.
We had gone looking for Mark Salter, McCain's longtime aide, and got the candidate himself, who pulled back the curtain on the first-class section, where he and the staff and Secret Service sit. When Elisabeth asked whether it was true, McCain just smiled mischievously, and went back to sit down, out of reach.
Salter then issued a series of elaborate "no comments" to us and the rest of the press corps, which tried 57 different ways to get him to tip his hand about what might happen.
Would McCain be accompanied Tuesday by Mitt Romney, whose New Hampshire country house is only a few miles from Rochester?
"No comment."
Had a decision been made on the vice-presidential nomination?
"I've been told harshly [by McCain] to say nothing about this in any way, and I won't."
Will McCain be appearing alone at the Rochester town meeting, or with a guest?
"I can't tell you."
"Is [columnist] Bob Novak [who first mentioned the possibility of a pending VP pick on Monday] reliable?
"Novak is sometimes wrong and sometimes right."
What Salter could tell us, through his reaction to our questions, was that the McCain campaign is mightily annoyed at the disparity in the media coverage this week. And it's not hard to understand why. Barack Obama has a newly chartered jumbo jet, loaded to the gills with reporters and network anchors accompanying him to the Middle East and Europe, while McCain's traveling press corps numbers only about 25, including camera crews. While CBS News anchor Katie Couric and ABC News anchor Charles Gibson are traveling with Obama, neither CBS News nor ABC News sent even a correspondent to cover McCain. (NBC News is covering both). And this is hardly unique to this week. Only the Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal among big newspapers are consistently covering McCain. NEWSWEEK almost always has a reporter on the plane, but Time and U.S. News do not.
So the best bet is that the vice-presidential tease is just a way to get more reporters up to New Hampshire Tuesday to cover McCain in his most effective venue, a New Hampshire town meeting.
Since his Navy days, McCain has loved practical jokes. And he seems to be enjoying the idea of yanking our chain.
Or maybe the McCain campaign actually will step on Obama's big trip, with a big announcement at the Rochester Opera House at noon. Stay tuned