Laura Bush: A Second Look at the First Lady

A new term and Laura Bush is thinking big. Take a second look at the First Lady.

A Teacher and Educator

When Laura Bush walked into the room wearing a stunning tangerine suit, I wanted to say -- just the way I would to a friend -- "Have you been working out?" "Have you changed your hairstyle?" She looked slimmer and even younger than the woman I interviewed a little less than four years ago, on the day before the world changed. Back then, on September 10, 2001, Washington, still reeling from an election that rested on a mere 537 votes in Florida, was recovering from culture shock. The Bushes ran a very different White House than the Clintons. They were on time for appointments, they spent quiet evenings with intimate friends, and they went to bed early. Not exactly a hip Hollywood lifestyle. But the First Lady -- a title she still thinks of as too lofty and inauthentic to describe her -- was winning hearts and minds. She is, after all, a teacher and educator. She taught elementary school in Houston and Austin for several years, and produced an outstanding book fair in Washington with some of America's greatest authors populating vast lawns filled with tents, talking to throngs about their works. Laura Bush's love of reading is partly what defines her. I always wondered if books were substitutes for the brothers and sisters she didn't have growing up in Midland, Texas ... if they kept her from feeling lonely.

Why She's So Popular
On the day of our visit last January, as my colleague Bill Beaman and I sat in a room waiting for the First Lady, we noticed a wall full of children's books, and thought they might be some of her favorites. The room was plain, rather cozy (read small), and under-decorated. We were told the interview would take place in Mrs. Bush's office, and assumed this was a waiting room. Wrong. This was Laura Bush's office: childcentric art and literature, a simple desk, a small sitting area, and that's it. How true to her style, I remember thinking. The tangerine suit was a compromise to the role of political wife. The office wasn't. You could imagine her in jeans and a work shirt, organizing anything from a bake sale to an inaugural ball. Then it dawned on me. The reason Laura Bush is perhaps the most popular First Lady since her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, is because of the jeans and work-shirt attitude she projects to the country.

Her numbers are astounding: According to a recent Gallup Poll, she has an 85% approval rating, roughly 30 points higher than her husband.

One reason is that she hasn't made any mistakes -- not one -- during her four years in the White House. Compare that to Hillary Clinton's erroneous assumption that she should have a policy role in defining the nation's health care system. Or Rosalynn Carter's inclination to attend Cabinet meetings. Or Nancy Reagan and Jackie Kennedy's bent to spend serious taxpayer money redecorating, buying fine china, and otherwise making over the White House as part of their legacies. In contrast, Laura Bush's most dramatic contribution to White House décor had nothing to do with her or her social life in Washington. It had only to do with her husband. She designed a beautiful beige rug for the Oval Office, replacing the hideous blue one you see in facsimile if you watch "The West Wing." (When we interviewed the President last year, he spoke proudly of his wife's redesign.)

Laura Bush's hidden strength is that she doesn't have to be "First Lady" to be the President's wife. And if she were going to change anything with taxpayer dollars, it would have to have lasting value and a return on the investment -- ergo, the Oval Office, where heads of state could be as impressed as we were.

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