A Graceful Ballast in the Battleship White House

Perhaps the most telling thing you can say about Laura Bush is that most people, including her political adversaries, seem genuinely fond of her, something that could never be said about her flinty predecessor.

One always got the impression that even Hillary Rodham Clinton’s friends didn’t exactly like her. They respected her, of course, as did so much of the “I Am Woman” rank and file, who saw her as the first bona fide bra burner to infiltrate the White House.

She planted her man-eating maiden name like a black flag in her famous monogram, and Capitol Hill shuddered. Fearing Clinton was one thing, but liking her, that was always iffy. As she herself put it, she wasn’t the cookie baking type.

But Bush is drawing praise from all corners, foisted as she has been into the maelstrom of a national crisis the size of which we haven’t seen since World War II.

And that after coming to be first lady via the most contentious election in United States history, one that Democrats still insist the Supreme Court stole from Vice President Al Gore.

Not auspicious circumstances, but Bush has not shrunk from view, even though she, as Newsweek recently reported, “prefers blue jeans to dresses and regards putting on makeup as a chore.” Her quiet attractiveness appears to require neither artifice nor alchemy.

Bush has emerged Gibraltar-like from the ruins, gently stoic “as one, in suff’ring all, that suffers nothing,” Hamlet would have said. Even the usual prodding of the liberal media’s harpies and drones has had no discernible effect.

In interviews, Bush remains unruffled, taking the hysterical pace out of every hectoring jibe, softening every hardball to the consistency of her own meditative calm and handing it back melted and drawn like warm toffee.

Who knew? No one advertised the Bushies as a two for one, mostly because the ensconced feminist majority has silently ordained that being a wifey only counts if she’s worldly and ambitious. But Bush is neither and puts the best possible face on the feminine mystique, without herself being overtly traditional, either in stature or in scope.

She and Hillary Clinton can’t be compared fairly. They are as different as chalk and cheese.

Truth be told, though, past and prospective Republican den mothers have hardly been more comparable. Elizabeth Hanford Dole was always a little too steely to be winsome, her brittle veneer of hospitality cracking with every smile to reveal the Evita-like brine beneath. She worked the room like a spider.

Bush, by contrast, doesn’t have to. She speaks softly, and people lean forward to listen.

Nancy Reagan, on the other hand, was too rigid. History will remember her as a scold whose most famous words--”Just say no”--crackled through the free-for-all culture of the 1980s like a cranky grandmother’s nagging.

And then, of course, there’s the obvious parallel, Barbara Bush. Nothing like her daughter-in-law, she seemed to float through her husband’s administration beneath her signature white plume, a benign cloud, distinctly there but nothing to ruin a picnic.

Laura Bush is equally nonthreatening, but somehow more present in the foreground, which is why she’s earning herself a reputation as an advisor, though more of the existential than the wonkish variety. She criticizes her husband openly in matters of taste and decorum, as she did when President Bush churlishly ordered that Osama bin Laden be taken “dead or alive.” She reportedly thought that was too cowboyish a pose.

She also has not been afraid to touch policy matters when appropriate, not shrinking from the subtleties of the stem cell debate and speaking out for the civil rights of Afghan women.

It has been a noisy first year for our unprepossessing 46th first lady and full of tough challenges. She has met them with great dignity and little ceremony. She has earned our respect. And we should give it freely, because if, as seems likely, she is in store for still more duress, she’s going to need it.

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Norah Vincent is a freelance journalist who lives in New York City.