WITNESS: Talk meanders on McCain's Straight Talk bus

As a general news correspondent with Reuters in the United States, Andy Sullivan has covered hurricanes, executions, elections, scandals and computer hackers. He has been with the company since 2000. In the following piece, he describes the relaxed atmosphere on Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign bus.

By Andy Sullivan

ABOARD THE STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS (Reuters) - They call it the Straight Talk Express, but the conversation on Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign bus often meanders like a lazy river.

We're somewhere in South Carolina, and the Arizona senator is retelling a shaggy-dog tale from an old comic strip.

"Fenwick Ferd, while fishing, dropped his wedding ring in the water," he says in a stentorian voice. "Ten years later while cutting open a fish, he felt something hard. It was his thumb."

This isn't told to illustrate some larger point. We've just run out of other subjects to discuss.

As Democrats and Republicans square off in the state-by-state process to choose party nominees for the November U.S. presidential election, most campaigns carefully guard their candidates. They are wheeled out for short news conferences and then whisked away in a cocoon of BlackBerry-wielding aides.

For McCain, who displayed a similarly accessible style in the 2000 nominating contest that he lost to George W. Bush, the day is essentially one long news conference.

When he's not answering voters' questions at campaign stops, or satisfying local TV reporters with a response to "what a John McCain presidency would mean for the citizens of Fort Wayne," he's spinning tales for the journalists on the back of his bus.

For a campaign reporter used to hearing the same speech six times a day, this is as good as it gets.

McCain won South Carolina, a crucial victory, and finished third in Nevada in voting on Saturday. Good enough to keep the Straight Talk Express on the road.

Wedged next to him on a leather bench seat, I can ask him about anything that comes to mind -- the latest poll numbers, his take on Republican rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, his thoughts about whether it's more difficult to be a governor or a senator.

I have plenty of time, sometimes more than an hour, to follow up if I'm not satisfied with his answer. Eventually I run out of questions.

HOCKEY AND HELL-RAISING

That's when things get interesting.

With his more than two decades in the Senate, McCain has a well-honed ability to expound on any subject under the sun, from carbon emission-curbing schemes to the sorry state of Arizona's professional hockey team.