The interviewer from BBC Northern Ireland wanted this correspondent's views on the Clinton visit. Would it be true to say that he needs Ireland more than Ireland needs Clinton?
Come on. This is the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, who has just unleashed 70 cruise missiles on Sudan and Afghanistan to show terrorists that America's reach is global.
But, yes. At this time President Clinton needs any help he can get.
It was not planned this way, of course. The President has been hankering after a return visit to Ireland since that first one in 1995, which he has described as giving him the best days of his life.
Making amends to Dick Spring and Ballybunion for disappointing them over the planned golf game had become a standing joke question for Irish journalists whenever we got access to the President. Like Gen MacArthur, Mr Clinton promised he would return. But White House aides made it plain that the President could not go to Ireland just for a golf game. In fact, he could not go to Ireland at all unless it was part of a trip to a more important European country.
Then came the Belfast Agreement and the President's middle-of-the-night phone calls to help clinch the deal. Now there was a real reason to return to the scene of his earlier triumphs and take in Ballybunion on the way home.
Last May looked good, with the President scheduled to attend the Group of Eight economic summit in Birmingham. A quick dash to Ireland would be easy to arrange. But this would be during the referendum campaign, and should an American president be seen as part of it? Reluctantly, it was decided he should not.
Then in early July the White House gave the go-ahead for a Clinton-Yeltsin summit in September: another European trip to which an Irish leg could be attached. But the Drumcree standoff was filling the world's television screens with violent scenes which the Belfast Agreement was supposed to banish from Northern Ireland politics. Ever cautious and protective of the President, the White House stayed mum about an Irish visit, until Drumcree died down.
And then, just when the Ireland trip was fastened down, came the Monica Lewinsky thunderbolt. She had been involved in her own stand-off with independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The stalemate looked like dragging on well past the Russian and Irish visits.
Suddenly events followed one after another, and the context for the Russian and Irish visits changed utterly.
Now the US President, who will hail peace in Northern Ireland, prosperity in the Republic and play golf with Dick Spring, is in mortal danger at home as calls for his resignation increase. Omagh became part of the itinerary following the bombing, which the President condemned as "barbaric". The stricken town was added to the programme for next Thursday, which was already a logistics marvel, or nightmare, depending on your viewpoint.
Early that morning the President flies from Moscow with his entourage to Belfast. There he will meet the new Assembly, have private talks with political leaders, visit cross-community projects and give a major address before travelling to Omagh, where he will meet survivors of the bombing.
Then he will fly back to Armagh for a "reconciliation" event with church leaders and later go on to Dublin. (The President, by the way, spent part of his vacation on Martha's Vineyard reading a novel about life in Belfast called Eureka Street.)
Dublin will be a low-key stop compared with December 1995, when the President spoke to thousands in College Green, addressed the Dail and Seanad and drank in Cassidy's of Camden Street. This time there will be meetings with the Taoiseach and Opposition leaders, lunch and a speech in a high-tech American plant on the north side which will give the President the chance to praise the Irish economic miracle and the US role in it.
It would also be wrong, a US official said, to compare this visit with the mass events of the first visit. "In 1995 you had an atmosphere where the President wanted to encourage people to keep their faith in what was happening in the peace process. In 1998 you have a peace agreement with virtually every paramilitary group declaring a ceasefire. It is very changed circumstances."
He will deserve a round of golf after all that. And the Ballybunion back-drop of green fairways and Atlantic surf will look good on American television screens as the pundits voice-over their predictions about the much tougher contest awaiting him on the other side of that ocean.