Reporters covering Barack Obama heard the news aboard Obama 1 (the campaign for the first time chartered a second plane for the swelling press corps), just before takeoff. We were briefly assured by senior Obamas traveling staff that neither Obama nor running mate Joe Biden would have any on-camera comment about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s historic elevation as John McCain’s running mate.

So we dialed up the Obama press shop and found ourselves in the middle of a ripe field of dismissive comments about Palin’s lack of experience, her tenure as mayor of a small town, a row that’s now the subject of state investigation into pressure to fire an ex-brother-in-law, and other choice morsels that sought to portray Palin as something of a political midget.

These various split-second digs took full form in an official campaign statement moments later from spokesman Bill Burton:

“Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need, it’s just more of the same.”

That statement arrived just before takeoff (about 9:30 a.m. MDT). Not 30 minutes later, senior adviser Linda Douglass, reading from her Blackberry, gave the traveling press a very different statement, this one from Sens. Obama and Biden:
“We send our congratulations to Governor Palin and her family...