It was reminiscent of that scene in the movies when the librarian whips off her glasses and shakes out her bun. Why Mrs. Bush! We had no idea you were so ... funny.
Indeed, First Lady Laura Bush killed the other night at the annual White House correspondents' dinner. She mocked her husband's penchant for early bedtimes ("I am a desperate housewife!"), his inability to pronounce "nuclear," and in recounting a chestnut about how he tried to milk a male horse, she may have become the first presidential spouse in history to make a racy joke involving the president and a barnyard animal.
A certain public blossoming of the usually reticent first lady has intensified in the last few months, ever since her husband was sworn in for his second term and she appeared at his side as a more svelte, more fashionable incarnation of herself. Other changes are underfoot in the East Wing too. Already, Mrs. Bush has divorced the longtime White House chef after irreconcilable menu differences. She is entertaining more frequently and has hired a new chief of staff, new social secretary and new press secretary.
And she's going for substance as well. No longer content with hosting the high-class literary salons that characterized her first term in the White House, and beyond her symbolic post-Sept. 11 role of "comforter in chief," Laura Bush is seeking a meaningful legacy.
Her first task was to get noticed, which she accomplished in stellar fashion last Saturday.
"I thought, 'Wow, that was pretty raunchy stuff,' " said Lewis Gould, a retired University of Texas history professor who is editing a series of books on first ladies for the University Press of Kansas. "Now the challenge is to see whether she can take that opportunity and turn it into a legacy."
The very idea of a first lady leaving a lasting mark is a fairly modern invention. Although Eleanor Roosevelt was famous for her devotion to civil rights, world peace and liberalism in general, Gould said, it was not until Lady Bird Johnson -- and her mission to beautify America -- came along that the first lady had a structured work environment, with a chief of staff, press secretary and policy advisors.
Not that a staff makes it easy to be a presidential spouse. All modern first ladies have suffered with the double standard that attends a woman whose power is conferred by a husband's success. "They say it's almost impossible to satisfy the conflicting pressures," said Gould. "If I do too much, I am intrusive. If I try to advise my husband, I am being pushy. If I don't, then I am passive and don't care. I can give great speeches, but the press says, 'What's your program?' If I have a program, the White House advisors say you are not being the anti-Hillary that we want you to be." (During President Clinton's first term, his wife made a disastrous policy foray into health care, which was widely criticized as inappropriate because she was not an elected official.)
Laura Bush's second-term mission became clear on Feb. 6, when the president announced, during his State of the Union message, that his wife would head a three-year, $150-million initiative to help keep young men out of gangs by showing them "an ideal of manhood that respects women and rejects violence." The news was met with reactions that ranged from mockery ("a 'Saturday Night Live' skit waiting to happen," read one newspaper editorial) to praise ("another hopeful sign of the president's commitment" read another).
"She's actually turning into one of the more interesting first ladies of recent times," said Barbara Kellerman, a presidential scholar and research director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Laura Bush, more than most, has really become something slightly different from what we thought we were first getting. This shy, retiring librarian is growing into a woman of considerable style and increasing substance. She is changing before our eyes."
Western jaunt
Last week, the first lady spent three days visiting youth programs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Alameda and Portland, Ore. On her plane, in an interview with reporters, Bush acknowledged that the spotlight is brighter now that her husband's political career is nearing its end and her time in the bully pulpit is short.
"People are more interested in what I have to say than they were when we started," said Bush, who sat on a sofa in her private cabin aboard Bright Star, the name given any military plane she is on. "I wasn't really even on the radar screen, I think, until after Sept. 11.... I mean, it's my responsibility during these years that I do have a forum to talk about what I think is most constructive for our country."
