You see her on The Tonight Show, greeting the host like an old pal ("Ohh, Jaaayyy!") You see her on Oprah, joined by her two incurably giggly daughters. She'll be seen in dozens of other venues -- gracious, cordial, impeccably yet tastefully dressed -- before all is said and done. Laura Lane Welch Bush, lover/helpmate/ nanny/enabler of the worst President in American history, is taking the grand (media) tour, hawking Spoken from the Heart, her tell-nothing memoir of life in the White House, a doorstop of a book glossing over her husband's criminal incompetence, promoting a blinkered, no, blinded view of his eight-year disaster...
Whoa, you say, hold on now. Surely it is unfair to tar any First Lady -- any wife -- with the brush of her husband's misdeeds; and that particularly applies to Mrs. Bush, who was probably the most powerless, uninvolved First Lady since Pat Nixon. Who can fault her, this nice, charming woman who spent most of her time encouraging kids to read, for marrying a jerk who drove his country into a ditch? After all, she wasn't the one at the wheel.
True, but neither was she kidnapped and tied up in the trunk. There are actually two good reasons not to let Mrs. Bush off the hook; one is about her in particular, the other about her role in a larger phenomenon.
Number 1: Reader, she married him. Whatever it was that made George W. Bush personally attractive to Laura Welch, she also knew (or found out soon enough) that he belonged to a rich, well-connected family which became more so when her father-in-law was elected Vice President. And for more than three decades, she reaped the benefits. A woman who might have had an unexceptional "Friday Night Lights" existence as a small-town Texas librarian wound up instead with (literally) a rose garden... not to mention world travel, state dinners, a personal entourage, etc. She has enjoyed the perks of being Mrs. George W.; how can anyone now look at her as a completely separate entity?
Besides, everyone who knows Mrs. Bush attests that she is no cream puff, that in some ways she is tougher than her husband -- "the steel in his spine," one of them put it. We've all heard the story of how she got him to stop drinking by threatening to walk out. Fine, but why stop there? Did she ever try to do anything about his bullying, frat-boy arrogance, his utter lack of intellectual curiosity, or the other traits that made him absolutely unsuited for the Presidency? Did she ever try to counter the Mafia-wife worldview of Barbara Bush, who taught her son to value loyalty over competence and treat dissenters as enemies? If she did, no evidence has come to light. He got sober, he never strayed, and she went back to the library. This was her choice, and it is fair to call her on it.
Number 2: She's Not Alone. I'm not saying that Mrs. Bush or her publisher timed it this way, but her book arrives as part of the recently launched (and inevitable) campaign to rehabilitate her husband's reputation. We've already had Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence, which caused even a Beltway hack like Mark Helperin, in an otherwise oh-so-respectful review, to raise an eyebrow over "[Rove's] portrait of Bush as a detail-oriented man of principle and accomplishment." And the Great Man's own memoir is supposed to come out soon.
But these can be dismissed for the partisan screeds they are; Mrs. Bush, with her Caesar's-wife reputation, invites a more "open-minded" view. The many readers who like her personally will open the book, curious to know more about her life and thoughts, and soon learn about the simple, honest, decent man who only wanted to protect America, who felt really, really bad about what happened to New Orleans, who cared deeply about poor people and workers and the environment... and over time, whenever his name comes up at a family gathering or a dinner party, perhaps the ensuing conversation will be a bit less, um, one-sided. Whether or not that was Mrs. Bush's goal in writing her book, there's no doubt her husband's gang will be using it to that effect.
And who's to say they won't succeed? A number of factors are working in their favor. First you have the roughly one-fourth of the voters who never stopped thinking Bush did a fine job, or who hate Democrats and liberals too much to care about the record. Add those "independents" who less than two years after voting for non-specific "change," now feel buyer's remorse because in their view, the change has been too specific. Throw in the notoriously short memories of the American people. Top it off with Obama's refusal (motivated, I would imagine, by his admirable but futile hope of achieving a "post-partisan" America) to fully air his predecessor's misdeeds or completely break with his policies. Thus the recipe for the comeback is complete. Before you know it, the only people still talking about Bush's unique awfulness will be the usual suspects... you know, those pesky lefties who hate him because he cut taxes, fought the terrorists and talked like a real American.
Listen, no one is lumping Mrs. Bush in with the true dragon ladies of modern history -- the Imelda Marcoses, the Xiang Qings (Mao Zedong's wife), the Eva Perons. No one is suggesting that like Mussolini's mistress or the wife of the Romanian dictator Ceausescu, she join her man in front of a firing squad. But neither does she deserve a free ride just because she wasn't in on the Iraq planning sessions.
I wouldn't condemn Laura Bush for not being Hillary Clinton or Rosalynn Carter. Yet Nancy Reagan at least tried to get her husband to do more about the AIDS epidemic. On the issues of her time, Mrs. Bush did not even do that much, either because she had no problem with any of Mr. Bush's policies or because she could not be bothered to say anything.
Which is why we should not bother to treat her differently from her spouse and the rest of his crew.
*Interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News, 2006
