Now, more prime time for the first lady

In a rare appearance Sunday on an interview program that usually features presidential candidates, senators and Cabinet secretaries, First Lady Laura Bush discussed her increasingly visible personal role on such diverse issues as democracy in Myanmar and breast cancer prevention in the Middle East.

“It took me a while to realize what a platform I had, and that I could be the one to go to the Middle East and talk about breast cancer, and literally bring up a topic that was a taboo topic to talk about, very much the way it was in the United States 25 years or 30 years ago,” Bush said on “Fox News Sunday.”

She has just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, highly conservative countries in which she helped women and doctors promote a public conversation on the importance of early breast cancer detection.

“The fact is: I’ve been involved for a long time in policy, and I think I just didn’t get a lot of coverage on it,” she said. “I really do think there’s a stereotype, and I was stereotyped in a certain way because I was a librarian and a teacher and, you know, had the careers that traditional women have.”

Her interest in Myanmar, also known as Burma, has caught some observers by surprise. She has established herself as a public ally of the democracy movement there, urging U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to condemn a military crackdown on activists. Bush said she was moved by the story of democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner under house arrest.

“She wants a peaceful reconciliation in her country, and I’ve just been inspired by her story,” Bush said. “I talk to the president about Burma. I meet with Burmese dissidents. I’ve had the chance to talk about that.”

At home, where Bush has promoted literacy and public education, her approval ratings are overwhelmingly positive, even as her husband’s have been dragged down by the Iraq war.

On presidential politics, particularly on Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Bush agrees that being first lady provides for valuable experience.

“There’s no doubt . . . that you know everything about living in that house,” she said. “And the other thing you know is things are going to happen that you’re not going to expect, that you better be prepared for.”

But she left no doubt where her loyalties lie: “I’m going to be voting for the Republican,” she said.

Overseas, Bush has turned out to be a welcome emissary, less polarizing than administration figures such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But the first lady usually works in tandem with her husband’s administration, as she did this year on her trip to Africa, in which she helped promote the president’s AIDS initiative.

The recent Middle East trip was no exception: She traveled under the auspices of a program cosponsored by the State Department, the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Bush’s mother and a grandmother had breast cancer, and the first lady volunteered early on for the Komen Foundation.

She said that on her Middle East trip, she learned as much about Arab women as she tried to teach them about being open in dealing with breast cancer. Partly because of social taboos, such cancers are usually detected later among Arab women and are thus harder to treat. Breast cancer also appears to strike at an earlier age among Arab women.

She said she told Arab women: “I had always felt they were closed to me, that I wouldn’t be able to reach them because of the way they’re covered.

“And one of the women said to me . . . ‘You know, I may be all dressed in black, but I am transparent.’ ”

Arab women and American women, Bush said, have the same reaction to a diagnosis of breast cancer: “They’re scared.”

Bush also talked of one woman who wanted to start an Internet support group in Arabic for breast cancer survivors.

As the administration approaches its last year in office, Bush said, she and her husband feel a sense of urgency on the issues they care most about.

“I know that he wants Iraq . . . to settle down, to be really the Iraq democracy, to be stronger and built up,” she said. “And, actually, that’s what I think we’re seeing there.”

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ricardo.alonso-zaldivar@latimes.com