Poppy Bush & Geraldine Ferraro on VP debates. And if you can stomach it, there's VIDEO!

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Bush, Ferraro on Biden vs. Palin



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26973494/

By Michael Inbar
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 9:23 a.m. PT, Wed., Oct. 1, 2008

Call them the odd couple of political debate: George H.W. Bush and Geraldine Ferraro. On the eve of the highly anticipated face-off between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, the first man and woman to tangle in a U.S. vice presidential debate visited TODAY for an exclusive interview, and discussed the debaters who will follow in their footsteps a quarter-century later.

The father of the current president says Biden faces some of the same challenges he did when he tangled with Ferraro in 1984. When TODAY’s Jamie Gangel asked if he was nervous that night, Bush freely admitted that he was.

“Everybody said, ‘You’re debating the first time a woman has ever run for national office like this,’ Bush recalled. “ ‘You’ve got to be very careful, and you’ve got to be sure you don’t seem overbearing and rude.’ So I was thinking all of these terrible things.”

Bush told Gangel that Biden is “going to have his hands full. If he’s seen as a chauvinist or a bully or piling on, I think women would resent that. And so would men.”



These days, the 41st president and former congresswoman Ferraro lock arms instead of horns; the former political adversaries are friends. Ferraro even brought some of her family members to Bush’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the interview with TODAY took place.