WASHINGTON - US President Bush and House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the biggest loser and winner on Election Day, pledged over lunch Thursday to bury the hatchet and cooperate. When possible.

At the White House, where Bush had invited Pelosi for lunch, presidential aides joked that there was no crow on the menu for Bush to eat.

US President Bush, right, shakes hands with Democratic House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of Calif., during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006. [AP]

Bush ate a little anyway, and he saluted Pelosi, not only as Tuesday's victor but as the first woman who will ascend to the position of House speaker, third in line to the presidency.

"The elections are now behind us, and the congresswoman's party won," Bush said. "But the challenges still remain. And therefore, we're going to work together to address those challenges in a constructive way."

Said Pelosi, like Bush all smiles: "We both extended the hand of friendship, of partnership to solve the problems facing our country."

She was accompanied by Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House's second-ranking Democrat. Bush was accompanied by a stony-faced Vice President Dick Cheney.

The president and his guests sat down for a make-nice luncheon of pasta salad and chocolate in Bush's private dining room off the Oval Office.

Later in the day, Bush telephoned Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to congratulate him on the Democrats' takeover in the Senate as well. The switch in power in that chamber became sure Wednesday night, when enough votes were counted to confirm the defeat of Virginia GOP Sen. George Allen. Reid, likely to be majority leader in the new Congress, was getting his own meeting with Bush at the White House on Friday.

Meeting reporters in the Oval Office, Pelosi and Bush shook hands for the cameras. The president and the woman whose party beat his this year leaned forward in their silk-upholstered seats. They promised cooperation in a government that, come January, will be divided between a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress.

Though the two sought to show they were putting the barbs in the past, they did not ignore the differences that they debated so hotly before the voting.

Pelosi has made clear that House Democrats will move immediately on their agenda, much of it opposed by Bush, which includes cutting student loan interest rates, funding embryonic stem cell research, authorizing the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare patients and imposing a national cap on industrial carbon dioxide emissions.

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