Maggie's one good story ...again

This from US News and World Report:

Spellings to Rove: Let's Just Be Friends

He can be blunt when addressing his enemies, but there was a time that former Bush political adviser Karl Rove had difficulty expressing himself. Just ask Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

She appeared on NPR's popular Wait, Wait. Don't Tell Me and was grilled about the time 25 or 30 years ago that Rove asked her out on a date. Asked if she rejected him, she deadpanned: "Well, have you met Karl Rove?"

Then Spellings explained that it wasn't until Rove later talked about being rejected that she even knew he'd asked her out.

To host Peter Sagal, she said, "It was a little bit awkward all the way around, and I wasn't even sure that that was what he was asking."

Rove has since joked that it took a decade to get over the rejection. "He tells the story after the fact," says Spellings. "I'm like: Is that what's going on here?" She once even called his approach "inept." She summed up their relationship this way: "We're very good friends and both happily married."

As for the show, Spellings won, answering two of three multiple-choice questions about Dungeons and Dragons correctly even though she confessed, "I don't know anything about that."

Besides, she was already sweet on someone else.

A Pop Quiz for the Education Secretary

Poor Margaret Spellings!

The secretary of education was ready to talk student loans, No Child Left Behind, blah, blah, blah, when she came into The Post for an interview with editors and reporters last week.

So maybe she was taken aback when a reporter (not us, we swear!) asked why she turned down Karl Rove when he asked her out back in the early '80s. (Rove later joked it took his ego "decades to recover.")

Spellings paused, reports our colleague Amit Paley, then said: "Have you met Karl Rove?"

"He was so inept and so inartful," she added. "I mean, I couldn't even understand."

We should note that our mean old co-workers brought up the Rove thing only to change the subject after they had inadvertently made Spellings cry.

When asked to describe a side of President Bush the public doesn't know, the secretary started telling an old story about how then-Gov. Bush consoled a Texas official who had broken down while eulogizing a colleague. "Oh, I'm going to cry just telling you the story," she said, removing her glasses and dabbing her eyes with a napkin. "Y'all, I can't believe you did this to me!"

She left the interview still a little weepy and mulling the potential impact of crying in front of the press. "Now you'll take sympathy on me," she said. "Maybe."

This from Reliable Source at the Washington Post.