Since the issue of McCain and judges continues to attract attention, I might as well add my two cents.

I read John Fund’s piece on the Wall Street Journal website Monday morning. At about noon, I headed out to cover a McCain rally at a private aviation hangar at the Orlando airport. I ran into Steve Schmidt, a McCain campaign aide (and former top Bush campaign official), who has some standing on this issue because he was the man picked by the Bush White House to shepherd the Alito nomination through the Senate. Schmidt was pretty unhappy about the Fund story, said it had no basis, and said he had already responded to it. I said that it would be better if McCain himself responded. Schmidt was noncommittal, and that’s where we left it when the rally began.

After the rally, McCain did not speak to the press, and instead went into an office to meet some people. As I was about to leave, I pulled up the Corner on my BlackBerry and read the already, shall we say, vigorous discussion about McCain. I went back to Schmidt, as well as to Mark Salter, who is McCain’s closest aide, and said some conservatives were really upset about this Alito stuff, and it really would be a good idea to get the senator’s response out of his own mouth. A couple of minutes later, I was in a small conference room talking to McCain. Shortly after that, I put his response on the Corner before leaving the hangar.

Later that afternoon, heading to Tampa for McCain’s final rally of the Florida campaign, I got a call from a Republican political consultant and PR man – not, as far as I know, affiliated with any campaign – who had contacted NRO. He wanted to put me in touch with two sources who had been at the meeting where McCain was said to have made his Alito-wore-his-conservatism-on-his-sleeve comment. I was told that neither man would speak on the record. I wanted to think about it. The McCain rally was in 30 minutes, so, after talking briefly with Kathryn, I decided to go to the rally and mull it over later.

After the rally, I called one of the sources. He was adamant about not speaking for attribution. So we talked on background, with the understanding that we would revisit the attribution question and that I might decide not to use what he had to say if he was still firm about not speaking by name.

He told me he had been at a meeting of several conservatives with McCain in the first few months of 2007. Someone asked McCain what kind of Supreme Court justice he would appoint. “He said, I really like Justice Roberts, I think it’s a great pick,” the source told me. “He said, Sam Alito, I’m not so sure about, and the implication was that he was too conservative. He is the type of nominee who would create too much controversy, so I’d be looking for someone like Justice Roberts.” The source stressed that he wasn’t quoting McCain, whose exact words he didn’t remember.

I asked whether McCain said anything about Alito wearing his conservatism on his sleeve. “I’ve seen that in print, and I do not remember it in those words,” the source told me. “I’m certainly not the source for that. The gist of it was that Roberts is the type of justice I’m more comfortable with because Alito is more unambiguously conservative. I certainly wouldn’t want to be putting those exact words into the senator’s mouth.”

I asked whether McCain had ever said that Alito was conservative, or too conservative. “The words were probably more in the sense of he would be too controversial,” the source said. At that point, I was not sure, because the source seemed not to be sure, whether McCain had used the word conservative or not. Clearly, my source thought McCain’s saying that Alito was “controversial” was code for “conservative.”

Maybe it was. I asked whether the source was sure that the meeting occurred after the 2006 election – that is, after Republicans lost the Senate. Yes, it did, he said. (Robert Novak placed it in April 2007.) “Controversial” nominations are certainly a bigger problem for a Republican president with a Democratic Senate, and I wondered if McCain might have been referring to that. “I think he was reflecting on his experience with the two of them [Roberts and Alito],” the source told me.

The whole exchange about judges was pretty brief, my source said, and the meeting covered a lot of other issues of interest to the people present. Was there anything else? I asked. “Just that one of the reasons I haven’t said anything about this before was that it wasn’t a big public meeting,” the source told me. “He was trying to gain the support of conservatives.”

We talked a little more about whether he would speak for attribution. The answer was still no. After our discussion, I called Kathryn back and said that because he so firmly refused to be identified, and because his memory was inconclusive, I wasn’t inclined to go with his account. She agreed. As for the other source – it was nighttime, and I didn’t have his home or cell number, and I had a McCain story due in the morning, so I moved on.

What is the bottom line? Well, there had already been anonymous sources telling the story about McCain, through John Fund. McCain had answered them on the record. At that point, I thought it was important that someone who was criticizing McCain come out in public and give his version of events. But my source wouldn’t do that, and so far, no one else has, either. Why not? I’m not exactly sure. I don’t think they’re lying, but I’m not sure their memories are exactly clear, either. And I don’t think there was any pledge of confidentiality involved. But I do know that if someone did go on the record, there would be plenty of questions like the ones I asked my source. Did McCain say the conservatism-on-his-sleeve remark attributed to him? Did he use the word “conservative” at all, or just say Alito was “controversial”? Are the people who are telling the story now working for, or supporting, other campaigns? (The source I spoke to supports Romney and is “really uncomfortable about McCain.”) Those are all reasonable questions, and my source, at least, just didn’t want to come out in the open.

So there you have it.