So they've called each other names. These two are pros. And they get along fine.
Alexandra Pelosi is uniquely positioned to judge how the President and the future Democratic House Speaker will get along. At 36, she is the youngest of Nancy Pelosi's five children, and her famous HBO documentary, Journeys with George, was a backstage "video diary" of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign. She was the first to introduce the two. Her inside take on their relationship:
Back on the campaign plane when George W. Bush was a Governor running for President in 2000, he used to pass me notes to read to the Congresswoman from San Francisco. When a newspaper article touted her prowess at raising funds, he tore it out and wrote on it, "Ask her: Can I have some?" Or when a magazine ran its guesses for his vice-presidential short list, he wrote in "Pelosi," along with, "Can you get her to run with me?"
When my parents came to have lunch with me at an Oakland airport hotel where Bush was giving a speech in March 2000, he did what he did when any member of the traveling press corps was in his or her hometown: he summoned us to his room so he could meet the parents. As he talked about the rigors of life on the trail, my mother politely explained how she was working her heart out to help Al Gore win the state of California.
The next time I saw them together, George was in the White House, and he told me, "You ought to be proud of your mom." At the time she was fighting her heart out on the House floor against the Iraq war. On any occasion that I have seen them together in private, they have appeared to be the best of "frenemies"--campaign-trail speak for politicians who keep their friends close and their enemies closer.
They actually have a lot in common. His father was President, and her father served in Congress and then as mayor of Baltimore. They both came to politics later in life, and they both mean it when they say that elections are not everything; if they lose, life will go on. Bush has the ranch, and my mother has her grandkids. And, of course, some people have made the mistake of underestimating both of them.
During the 2000 campaign, George used to respond to the jabs from late-night comedians by saying, "Let them laugh at me. I am going to be their President." On the trail in 2006, as the doubters were calling the Democrats a permanent minority, my mother repeated her mantra: We have better candidates. When anyone used the tired phrase, "Where are the Democrats?", she explained that everything was going exactly as planned; she was like a submarine on a stealth mission to take back the House.
On the day the President first criticized her at a fund raiser, she knew that he had given her a gift. When the President of the United States mocks you, it puts you on the map. And when he mocks you publicly, the money rolls in. Sure, they have their ideological differences. By now you have heard everything they have said about each other. But plenty of presidential candidates have said worse things about their opponents before they have chosen them as their running mate or their designated successor (witness John McCain).
While reporters like to stir the pot and focus on the catfights, they don't seem to grasp that these are two seasoned professionals working at the highest level of American government with skin so much thicker than the rest of us. As Bush noted in his press conference on the day after the election, "This isn't my first rodeo." Or as my mother has always told me, "This business comes with a free head clipping. Every time you stick your neck out, they come around and cut it off."
George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi both know that if you want to breathe the rarefied air at the highest echelons of the U.S. government, you have to ignore the media buzzards. When I was watching Fox News recently, and she walked into the room, I had to explain that Sean Hannity was spending the month leading up to the election warning America that Speaker Pelosi would destroy this nation. She asked, "Which one is Hannity?"
So as all of us spectators sit home on our couches watching the bloviators pontificate about the state of American politics, rest assured that George Bush and Nancy Pelosi are so busy that they do not hear a word of it. And if they did, they couldn't care less. They have a country to run.
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