Love, Washington Style

CBS News Political Senior Editor Dotty Lynch takes a look at love in the nation's capital.

Both President Bush and Sen. Hillary Clinton spent Valentine's Day spouseless. Laura Bush, still in Texas redecorating the ranch, sent her husband a coconut crème pie. While in New York, Peck's Bad Boy soothed his latest wound from Mary Jo White's dagger by having dinner with Kofi Annan, Dick Holbrooke and Karenna Gore Schiff, Al's number one daughter.

No skinny on what Bill sent Hill – though she may have wanted to toss him one of those Laura Bush pies – but word has leaked out that there's a new man in Hillary Clinton's life.

Hillary's new heartthrob – professionally speaking, of course – is Sen. Robert Byrd, 73.

And the feeling is apparently mutual. Byrd, in an interview this week on CNN, positively cooed about the junior senator from New York, who has found happiness on the Senate Budget Committee.

"I like the way she approaches hearings," he said. "She follows what the witness says and asks probing and pertinent questions."

Byrd, who has disdain for "showhorses" – politicians who appear on Sunday talk shows – and clearly thought ill of the senator’s husband, said Hillary came to him for guidance "and she took notes and really wanted to hear what I have to say."

While Washington whispers that the former first lady is glum, her staff insists that she loves the budget committee and has immersed herself in the nitty gritty of the Senate, speaking out on issues from election reform to, of course, health care.

Hillary also apparently loves getting to know her new colleagues and she has started attending weekly prayer meetings with some of them. Meanwhile, with the political guidance of her once and future advisor, Harold Ickes, she has started a political action committee, Hill PAC, to raise money for candidates and to pay for her political travels.

In the latest chapter of her transitional saga, It Takes a Moving Van, she's about to leave her temporary digs at Vernon and Ann Jordan's place and move into a refurbished Washington manse.

But she begins her holiday weekend Friday in Buffalo opening her district office. Back in New York she will be greeted by constituents who are not quite as loving as Sen. Byrd. This week's Quinnipiac poll showed her husband's pardons and the Gift-gate scandal taking a toll. Her approval rating slipped to 38 percent from 46 percent in December.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush embarks on a holiday weekend that begins with a quick trip to Mexico and ends on Monday with a museum opening in Oklahoma. The president will also be reunited with Laura and will get to sample the product of her two-week Texas hiatus – the new improved Bush ranch. And, if he's lucky, maybe another coconut crème pie.

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