AP News, July 7th, 2007
When President Bush invited lawmakers for a picnic, an approaching storm threatened to derail the event. His spokesman, Tony Snow, suggested that Democratic leaders in Congress secretly wanted it that way.
"They've been seeding the clouds," he said.
A little joke, a little suspicion. It seemed appropriate for Bush's relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
In public, there are promises to work together, then unmistakable acrimony. Private dealings are respectful, but not fully trustful.
Where ill will seeps out between Bush and the two Democratic leaders, it is not based on personal animus, those close to them say. Rather, it is rooted in vastly different views of how to run the country, and how much say each side has in running it.
Pelosi and Reid say Bush blithely dismisses their roles as leaders of a coequal branch of government; Bush says they overreach and meddle, never more so than in the case of the war in Iraq.
How well they get along, a fascination in Washington, is important in a much broader sense: It affects what they get done for the country.
On that front, progress has been slow during the first half-year of this divided government.
Bush and Democratic leaders agreed on new trade-policy guidelines, but Congress later refused to renew his fast-track trade power. Bush vetoed the Democrats' bid to expand stem cell research, a move that Reid and Pelosi called deplorable.
The president's immigration overhaul is dead. A potential energy agreement looks shaky at best. Bush is also in a worsening standoff with Congress over the firing of U.S. attorneys, and a huge fight is brewing over the main spending bills that keep the government in operation.
And, of course, there's the war.
"It's hard to know how they would get along without Iraq," said Charles Jones, who studies relations between Congress and the president as a nonresident senior fellow for The Brookings Institution.
"There are some issues on which they would probably work pretty effectively together, but the overlay of Iraq and the intense conflicts spills over," Jones said. "It makes it difficult for them just to say, 'Well, let's forget Iraq and work nicely on other issues.'"
The White House disputes that spillover, citing quiet negotiations taking place to renew Bush's education law and work with Democrats on the immigration legislation. The immigration bill died when conservatives in Bush's own party rebelled against it.
Iraq may be the better test case of Bush's relationship with Reid and Pelosi.
It took more than three months for Bush and Congress to agree on a war funding bill, gobbling up valuable and finite legislative time.
Bush vetoed the Democrats' first try because it included a timeline for U.S. troop withdrawal. Then came a grim meeting in which Bush, Pelosi and Reid chose negotiators but got little else done.
In the days that followed, Pelosi miffed the White House by holding a vote to pay for the war in stages, drawing another veto threat. Another negotiation session broke down.
Ultimately, hemmed in by time, both sides had to give or risk the political catastrophe of leaving combat troops unfunded.
So Democrats gave up the timeline for withdrawal. Bush agreed to add domestic spending to the bill and establish benchmarks for measuring progress in Iraq.
"The vote showed what's possible when we work together," the president said.
The reality is that the compromise was forced upon them all, because no one wanted to cut off money for the troops.
Still, quietly, some trust built through the experience. Bush's chief of staff, Josh Bolten, appreciated that Reid kept his word during negotiations; Reid respected that no details leaked from those private talks. He now says that Bush is listening more, but only compared with zero cooperation in prior years.
Bush's tendency has never been to engage Congress, said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University.
"He doesn't have a close relationship with either one of them," Thurber said, referring to Pelosi and Reid. "I think that makes a difference. I don't see any evidence that he has come around to engaging the opposition party the way (Bill) Clinton did."
Bush, Reid and Pelosi all dismiss the idea that they don't like one another despite the constant public harping.
When the cameras are off, the tone is different, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, who has sat with Reid and Pelosi in private sessions with Bush.
"It's not an acrimonious kind of thing," McConnell said. "In all the meetings I've been in, there's never been a lack of courtesy. I don't think there's anything personal. We are just in different places. Everybody fully understands that we have different agendas."
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EDITOR'S NOTE _ Ben Feller covers the White House for The Associated Press.
