House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked the campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama to stop their "bickering," The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

"My responsibility as speaker is to make sure that I have a Democratic majority in the Congress of the United States," Ms. Pelosi said Friday, during a luncheon in New York sponsored by Lifetime Networks and the Hearst Corp. "So while I want these candidates to operate on a proper tone so one of them will be in the White House, I have to insist upon it because I can't have their - if you want to call it bickering - have an impact on my congressional races."

Ms. Pelosi's comments came as Samantha Power, a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, apologized - and then later resigned - for calling Hillary Rodham Clinton "a monster" during an interview with a Scottish newspaper.

Mr. Obama's supporters have also complained about comments on Thursday by Clinton's spokesman, Howard Wolfson, who said that Obama's campaign was "imitating Ken Starr," the prosecutor who investigated the Clintons in the 1990s.

John Broder reported that Ms. pelosi met privately Thursday with Mr. Ickes and Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager, and discussed, among other topics, the Florida and Michigan primary problem, the tone of the campaign and the role of superdelegates.

By Liza Tozzi, The New York Times, March 7, 2008