Bush, Nancy Pelosi Try to Reconcile

President Bush pauses during a news conference, Wednesday in the East Room at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds) (Ron Edmonds - AP)

WASHINGTON -- He mocked her as "a secret admirer" of tax cuts and an opponent of measures crucial to keeping Americans safe, warning that "terrorists win and America loses" if her Democrats prevailed on Election Day.

She called him dangerous and in denial, an "emperor with no clothes" who has misled the country about Iraq and presided over an economy that still fails many.

Now, President Bush and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are making nice.

Within hours of an election that puts Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate for the final two years of Bush's presidency, the president and the woman all but certain to be House speaker proclaimed reconciliation.

It started with what both described as a gracious phone call early Wednesday and, at Bush's invitation, continues over lunch on Thursday.

Before that, the president was having breakfast with House and Senate Republican leaders and meeting with his Cabinet.

Bush and Pelosi pledged to find common ground in a turned-upside-down Washington.

"The people have spoken, and now it's time for us to move on," Bush told reporters in the East Room on Wednesday.

Said Pelosi in her own news conference at the Capitol: "Democrats are not about getting even. Democrats are about helping the American people to get ahead."

This after some seriously sharp rhetoric.

Pelosi's criticism of Bush occasionally veered into the personal. "Oblivious, in denial, dangerous," she said of him in early September, referring to his administration's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina. The president "is an incompetent leader _ in fact he's not a leader," Pelosi said in 2004, referring to his Iraq policies.

"`Stay the course' is not a strategy, it's a slogan, and we need more than that," she said in June in a jab at how Bush once described his approach to the war.