Laura Bush Can Stand on Her Own Two Feet

Three cheers to Norah Vincent for her Dec. 13 commentary on Laura Bush, “A Graceful Ballast in the Battleship White House.”

Vincent accurately paints a picture of a quietly competent and gracious first lady, one who lends long-overdue dignity and decorum to the White House. But shame on Vincent for denigrating Hillary Rodham Clinton with unnecessary potshots and politicizing the commentary. Laura Bush is a class act and, as she has proven, can stand on her own two feet.

William Gray

Long Beach

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Spare us the overreaching prose of writers like Vincent. Her premise is built on the tired approach of blasting one public figure in order to build up another. If she had wished to praise Laura Bush, why didn’t she devote the entire piece to that end? Instead, she adopted the ploy of denigrating Hillary Clinton to buff the image of Mrs. Bush. We’ve heard all that cheap denigration of Hillary before--from poison pens of the right wing whose vitriol Vincent cannot match.

Why did Vincent set out to compare the two first ladies--yea for Bush, nay for Hillary--then, deep in the article, declare that “they can’t be compared fairly”? She alternates between trying for profundity and achieving pomposity (“Bush has emerged Gibraltar-like from the ruins”) and low-rent vilification (“the liberal media’s harpies and drones”). The piece as a whole deserves study, because of its rich teaching points, for a class of beginning journalism students.

Norma J. Shattuck

Oakland