What the well-dressed campaign asset wears

Statuesque women in black ski pants and white fur boots wave the fashionable and the wannabes into the tents on Seventh Avenue. Inside, models with pursed lips and pencil-thin spiked heels parade down runways throwing hips to each side of the room. At a podium surrounded by red dresses, a dozen television cameras and a gaggle of photographers crowd for a front-row view.

But the clog of press attention here at Fashion Week is not aimed at the designers or the fur-and-feather-bedecked clothes they are unveiling for the fall season. What draws the paparazzi on this day is First Lady Laura Bush and her red-dress campaign to promote heart health for women.

Three years ago, when George W. Bush took office, fashionistas pilloried Laura Bush for her simple look, described by one stylist as “so Doris Day.” Now, she commands their attention in a red Oscar de la Renta suit with gold buttons and black slingback heels.

Her sartorial makeover is a metaphor for a new political reality. After three years in the shadows, Laura Bush is emerging as a presence in the political and policy life of the Bush administration. More popular than the president -- a Fox News poll taken last year found her favorable rating at 73%, about 30 points higher than her husband’s recent showing in the polls -- Laura Bush will be much more visible as she plans to stump for her husband’s reelection.

Already, she has raised more than $5 million for the Bush-Cheney campaign, and has three fundraisers planned for Southern California this week -- in Newport Beach, Palm Springs and Los Angeles.

“She generates a great deal of excitement,” said Alison Harden of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign staff.

With the role of political wives undergoing renewed media and public scrutiny, the White House is eager to showcase Laura Bush, and she seems only too happy to comply. A champion of education for girls in Afghanistan, the first lady hopes to travel to Kabul this year -- a mission to a war zone, something few other first ladies have requested.

An avid reader who launched the annual National Book Festival in Washington, she plans to resume the authors’ readings that she canceled last year when a group of invited poets vowed to use the occasion to protest the looming war in Iraq. And as a former teacher and school librarian, she will use some of her California stops on Wednesday to promote education.

By reputation, Laura Bush is a woman who sublimated her career ambitions and her politics to those of her husband. While clearly no Hillary Clinton, who carved out a policy role in what she viewed as a co-presidency, Laura Bush has been quietly influential in the causes she espouses -- education, arts, historic preservation, women’s health, global diplomacy.

When the White House earmarked a $65-million increase to the National Institutes of Health, the public announcement came, significantly, from Laura Bush. Ditto the $10 million in grants to help local communities preserve cultural icons, and the $18 million hike for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her influence on education is even more overt. When she visits L.A.’s Limerick Elementary School this week, she will participate in a round-table discussion with teachers and administrators about techniques to help struggling readers meet a White House goal that all American children be able to read by the third grade -- a program announced by President Bush in his State of the Union message.

“This is where Laura Bush’s legacy may best be found -- in the minutiae of policy for libraries, arts and history programs funding,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, who has written several books about first ladies. “I believe the president listens to her. Whenever she addresses issues of education and reading she becomes animated and enthusiastic. Her eyes seem to light up. This is her passion.”

Education Secretary Rod Paige agreed the first lady has been instrumental in education reform, pointing to several teacher-training programs that Laura Bush inspired by promoting second careers in teaching for business professionals and retiring military officers.

During the chaotic week when the federal budget was released, Paige took the time in answer to a press inquiry to praise Laura Bush’s involvement, saying her support had helped ensure that education was among the few domestic programs whose budget was increased.

“Mrs. Bush is a powerful advocate,” he said. “I’m sure she’s been coaching her husband about the importance of education. That’s at least two Mrs. Bushes he has to answer to.” (The president’s mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, promoted literacy while in the White House.)

For her part, Laura Bush -- she cringes at the title “first lady” -- discourages talk of a higher profile and hesitates to claim authorship of programs, such as the president’s new Reading First initiative, that clearly bear her imprint. “I’m glad to take the credit, but I don’t think that I deserve it,” she said in an interview.

She also bristles at being called a traditionalist. “In many ways, I’m a very contemporary woman,” she said, citing her master’s degree in library science, her work as a teacher in minority schools, her efforts as a mother. She faults the media too for leaving false perceptions about her husband that suggest Laura Bush is the reader, the smart one. “We both read a lot,” she said. “He read to our children just as much as I did. I didn’t go to Yale and Harvard.”

Reserved and guarded with the media, Laura Bush laughed when asked if she planned to read a biography just published about her. “I lived that life,” she said. “I don’t need to read and see how many mistakes she made in it. Which I can assure you there are a lot, without having read it.”

The book, “The Perfect Wife” by the Washington Post’s Ann Gerhart, argues that Laura Bush, who was 35 when she gave birth to her twin daughters, was overindulgent. And it retells the story -- disclosed during the 2000 campaign -- that at the age of 17, Laura Welch ran a stop sign in her hometown of Midland, Texas, hitting another car head-on and killing its occupant, Mike Douglas, a high school friend.

When she met George W. Bush he was a struggling oil man, renting office space above a soft drink distribution shop. Friends invited them both to a barbecue. Always an early-to-bed athlete, Bush stayed until midnight, talking to Laura Welch nonstop, according to Gerhart.

Asked what drew her to her husband, Laura Bush recalled in her interview with The Times, “George is very funny, he’s funny to be with. And I love that. I knew he would make me laugh for the rest of my life.”

On marrying into a political family in 1977, she made him promise that she would never have to give a political speech. A few months later he ran for Congress and, faced with a conflict in schedule, asked her to substitute for him. Even now she winces at the memory but concedes that having read to children as a librarian proved good training.

These days she can work a room with the best of them. In a White House ceremony launching the red-dress campaign earlier this month, she cited statistics showing that nearly half a million women die from heart disease each year, and that 65,000 more women will die from cardiovascular disease this year than men.

To an attentive East Room audience, she joked about her own battle to eat healthily (“I love enchiladas,” she explains), her mother-in-law’s exercise regime (“if Barbara Bush can swim 88 laps at a time, the rest of us can surely walk for 30 minutes”), and her husband’s health habits.

The designer red dresses hit the road next month, as the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute displays them in shopping malls in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia and San Diego, and offers visitors free screenings for early detection of heart disease.

The first lady will not be in attendance. But she has loaned a red dress to the traveling road show, one she wore to dinner with the presidents of Mexico and China. It’s another Oscar de la Renta.

Designer George Simonton, who dressed Laura Bush when her husband was governor of Texas, saw her recently and was struck by her transformation. She has slimmed down from a size 10 to a size 8, and looks “more with it and up-to-date. The president’s got an asset in her,” he said.

For her part, Laura Bush waved off a question about whether she feels vindicated by the fashion world’s embrace after its initial cold reception. Instead, she talked of the opportunities her job presents for dressing well.

“That is certainly one of the fun parts for me, with my husband being president,” she said. “I actually have bought some clothes. I didn’t have that many before.”