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."

By Paul Bedard