The vice president is on the telephone, wanting to talk about the new budget.
Al Gore is probably aware that, to many people, root canal surgery would be more fun than such a conversation.But the budget is serious business - if it were fun, there'd be something wrong with it - and the vice president lured me to the phone with promises of illuminating several "underestimated features" of the new agreement.
He sounded relaxed, and I could hear him smiling. The new budget deal had just been settled. If Al Gore had any concerns about campaign finance hearings, check-waving Buddhist nuns or the legion of OTHER Washingtonians eager to take credit for the country's first balanced budget deal in a generation - you wouldn't have known it.
Make no mistake: Al Gore is excited about this budget agreement.
The budget, he said, will "restore fairness to the way our country treats legal immigrants." He stressed the word "legal," putting vocal italics on the whole phrase "legal immigrants."
"Medicaid and other disability and health benefits were being wiped out for legal immigrants who are currently receiving assistance or had become disabled," he said. "This budget restores (the aid). Most Americans did not want legal immigrants who are hurting, to fear being turned out of their apartments or nursing homes, or otherwise made to suffer.
"But most Americans were not aware this was in the process of happening. It was an underreported story, not widely known. However, especially among American families of Hispanic and Asian heritage, it was a big worry and a huge issue."
He also talked long and hard about what he called "this fact: what the much-criticized tax increase of 1993 did for cutting the federal deficit and strengthening the country's economic health. It paved the way for the balanced budget agreement this year, and the tax cuts we can now afford."
Another underestimated feature of the budget, he said, is money targeted to cities, instead of to governors and states, to encourage employers to hire those who have recently been cut from the welfare rolls. The vice president's staff wants to be sure that Al Gore's active involvement in that plan isn't one more underestimated feature: They remind reporters of recent meetings between top mayors and the vice president to craft this plan.
As senators, members of Congress and the president himself jockey to take credit for the new budget, so must the vice president.
By getting actively involved in anything at all, Gore has already departed from the traditional role of the vice president. He has been a major player in most of the administration's key initiatives, and is one of the president's most influential advisers.
He hungers for his party's presidential nomination in the year 2000.
To position himself advantageously, then, Al Gore has had to dance the most delicate steps of a self-promoting macarena, neither calling too much attention away from his boss, nor allowing himself to fade into the background. He can't afford to seem disloyal, but he can't afford to be ignored.
He is the president's top cheerleader. But if you listen closely, in every rah-rah rallying cry for Numero Uno, you can hear a "Don't underestimate Number Two!"
Image is important in politics. And Gore's image as a reliable, even somewhat boring, policy maven (who gets excited about budgets) plays well - far better than his image as a Democratic Party fund-raiser.
Congressional and grand jury investigations into the fund-raising muck figure to reach their climaxes later this year. Winter is coming. But this is summer. And on this sunny afternoon, Al Gore is smiling, with one eye on the budget, the other on the millennium.