Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest, the 120 Miles in 90 Minutes edition.

I am David Plotz, the editor of Slate, alone again in Washington, D.C.

Because Emily Bazelon, Slate Senior Editor, is in New Haven. Hello, Emily.

Hello, David.

And John Dickerson, Slate's chief political correspondent and political director for CBS News, is in New Hampshire where all right-thinking, hardworking, political people are this week.

And John is joining us from a hotel room where he has an unusual problem. John,

you want to tell us about your problem? Well, I have a, but his phone is very funky. It smells,

not funky in the sense that it's, um, not James Brown. Not James Brown. It smells like what?

I want to hear. It's not James Brown. And it's also, also, it operates perfectly fine, but it smells, it doesn't smell good.

What does it smell like, John? What are you complaining?

It just smells like, I don't know, like feet or maybe like an old, you know, I don't know, like a banana that's been left in the glove box.

Really?

Speaking of which, when you're on the road and you eat McDonald's food and don't take the bag out of the car at the end of the day.

Oh, that's terrible.

I feel like you complain about this during every campaign.

It's like a lesson you have to learn over and over again.

The outset is a bad idea.

Anyway, but the amusing thing is that in this hotel, in this Radisson in Manchester, on every appliance, whether it's the phone or the remote control or what else do they put them on, there is a little towelette that they give you as if it's the only hotel I've ever been in where there's a little towelette placed on these devices.

And yet the phone still stinks to high-hound?

Well, no, because I don't rush into the hotel room and tear open the towelettes and douse the thing with sanitizer because I think, well, I don't know.

It just seems to me to be odd.

And if you're going to do that, why not just give you rubber gloves and a hazmat suit when you check in? Because of all the things from which you need to be protected in the hotel room, the bed itself is one grim kind of festering collection of nastiness. So the phone and the remote is not going. I'm not likely to touch the remote during my entire visit.

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