Bright Star indeed

It was reminiscent of that scene in the movies when the librarian whips off her glasses and shakes out her bun. Why Mrs. Bush! We had no idea you were so ... funny.

Indeed, First Lady Laura Bush killed the other night at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. She mocked her husband’s penchant for early bedtimes (“I am a desperate housewife!”), his inability to pronounce “nuclear,” and in recounting a chestnut about how he tried to milk a male horse, she may have become the first presidential spouse in history to make a racy joke involving the president and a barnyard animal.

A certain public blossoming of the usually reticent first lady has intensified in the last few months, ever since her husband was sworn in for his second term and she appeared at his side as a more svelte, more fashionable incarnation of herself. Other changes are underfoot in the East Wing too. Already, Mrs. Bush has divorced the longtime White House chef after irreconcilable menu differences. She is entertaining more frequently and has hired a new chief of staff, new social secretary and new press secretary.

And she’s going for substance as well. No longer content with hosting the high-class literary salons that characterized her first term in the White House, and beyond her symbolic post-Sept. 11 role of “comforter in chief,” Laura Bush is seeking a meaningful legacy.

Her first task was to get noticed, which she accomplished in stellar fashion last Saturday.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that was pretty raunchy stuff,’ ” said Lewis Gould, a retired University of Texas history professor who is editing a series of books on first ladies for the University Press of Kansas. “Now the challenge is to see whether she can take that opportunity and turn it into a legacy.”

The very idea of a first lady leaving a lasting mark is a fairly modern invention. Although Eleanor Roosevelt was famous for her devotion to civil rights, world peace and liberalism in general, Gould said, it was not until Lady Bird Johnson -- and her mission to beautify America -- came along that the first lady had a structured work environment, with a chief of staff, press secretary and policy advisors.

Not that a staff makes it easy to be a presidential spouse. All modern first ladies have suffered with the double standard that attends a woman whose power is conferred by a husband’s success. “They say it’s almost impossible to satisfy the conflicting pressures,” said Gould. “If I do too much, I am intrusive. If I try to advise my husband, I am being pushy. If I don’t, then I am passive and don’t care. I can give great speeches, but the press says, ‘What’s your program?’ If I have a program, the White House advisors say you are not being the anti-Hillary that we want you to be.” (During President Clinton’s first term, his wife made a disastrous policy foray into health care, which was widely criticized as inappropriate because she was not an elected official.)

Laura Bush’s second-term mission became clear on Feb. 6, when the president announced, during his State of the Union message, that his wife would head a three-year, $150-million initiative to help keep young men out of gangs by showing them “an ideal of manhood that respects women and rejects violence.” The news was met with reactions that ranged from mockery (“a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit waiting to happen,” read one newspaper editorial) to praise (“another hopeful sign of the president’s commitment” read another).

“She’s actually turning into one of the more interesting first ladies of recent times,” said Barbara Kellerman, a presidential scholar and research director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Laura Bush, more than most, has really become something slightly different from what we thought we were first getting. This shy, retiring librarian is growing into a woman of considerable style and increasing substance. She is changing before our eyes.”

Western jaunt

Last week, the first lady spent three days visiting youth programs in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Alameda and Portland, Ore. On her plane, in an interview with reporters, Bush acknowledged that the spotlight is brighter now that her husband’s political career is nearing its end and her time in the bully pulpit is short.

“People are more interested in what I have to say than they were when we started,” said Bush, who sat on a sofa in her private cabin aboard Bright Star, the name given any military plane she is on. “I wasn’t really even on the radar screen, I think, until after Sept. 11.... I mean, it’s my responsibility during these years that I do have a forum to talk about what I think is most constructive for our country.”

At every stop, she looked impeccable, not a hair out of place. (Although she does her own makeup, she travels with a hairstylist from a Washington salon.) She wore expensive, tailored pantsuits the entire trip, usually with a Hermes-style scarf around her shoulders. And she is much slimmer than she was at the beginning of the first term.

After visiting a Native American youth program in Phoenix, she landed at the Burbank airport in time to talk with Jay Leno about her initiative and her recent six-hour trip to Afghanistan. She was whisked by motorcade to a funky block on the western edge of downtown L.A. where, with National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, she watched teenagers perform a modernized excerpt of “Romeo and Juliet.” The program, Will Power to Youth, is part of Shakespeare Festival/LA’s program for 14- to 21-year-olds who live at or below the poverty level.

The next morning, she shared a reading lesson with some youngsters at Sun Valley Middle School and addressed a school assembly whose audience included L.A. schools Supt. Roy Romer. In the afternoon, Bush found herself surrounded by a rather formidable-looking group of former gangbangers and ex-cons.

“This is huge because it’s the first gang intervention program she’s ever visited,” said Father Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries (motto: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job”). Boyle, who sat with Bush in a tiny conference room of the organization’s silk-screen plant in a grimy warehouse district at 8th Street and Santa Fe Avenue, introduced the first lady to Alex Zamudio, a 31-year-old father of three with a fourth on the way. Zamudio, who lost an eye at 13 when he was shot in the face, is working toward a professional baker certificate at L.A. Trade Technical College. His chef’s garb prompted Bush to laugh when Boyle told her, “He’s got checkered pants, not just a checkered past.”

Her interest in gangs and young men, Bush told reporters later, was inspired by a dramatic New York Times magazine story by Jason DeParle, who wrote in August about a young Milwaukee father, a former pimp and drug dealer, who struggled to give his son the father he never had.

In March, Mrs. Bush met the father, Ken Thigpen, when she visited Wisconsin. “He literally turned his life around,” she said. “He cleaned up his life and quit dealing drugs and got a job ... so he could be at home with his son in the day while his girlfriend worked and then he delivered pizzas at night.”

Although she is the mother, famously, of high-spirited 22-year-old twin girls, the story got her interested in the lives of boys and their struggles. “I really think in our country, we’re at a very powerful crossroads where a lot of young men who didn’t have the advantage of growing up with a dad in their home want to change their lives so their children won’t have that disadvantage,” Bush said on the plane.

“This story about Ken is what made me start thinking that in a lot of ways we have neglected boys over the last several generations, that we bought into a stereotype of boys that all of us know intuitively is not right, that boys don’t need nurturing, that they can take care of themselves.... I think in a lot of ways, we set boys up to fail.”

Bush has also visited Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Pittsburgh since the State of the Union speech, paying special attention to anti-gang programs and literacy initiatives aimed at older children. She has received a raft of positive press, and has even taken to quoting in her speeches a boy in Detroit, who told a newspaper reporter in February, “I wish she could stay here.”

At Homeboy, as in all her group discussions, she listened intently, constantly interjecting nonverbal affirmations (“ummm hmmm,” “right,” “great,” “yes”) and sometimes finished a sentence along with a speaker. Some might call this overlapping style “interrupting,” but in Bush’s case it seemed to have a powerful validating effect on the children and adults who were already wowed by her presence. “The first lady is a very important person and she is not more important than you,” Father Boyle reminded his flock before she arrived.

“When you were a child and you went and chose the path to go to a gang,” Bush asked Zamudio, “do you think there was anything you could have done at that point in your life that would have directed you another way? Do you think you were just hellbent to go and do that before you could turn your life around?”

But, as Zamudio made clear, there had been no fork in the road. “Everywhere we grew up was gang-infested,” he explained. “You grow up into that -- either family members or people you go to school with. Everybody you are involved with is in gangs, so you end up being a gang member.”

On the plane returning to Washington, Bush said she had an epiphany of sorts, both at Homeboy and at Will Power to Youth. “I was struck by both the Shakespeare program, where those kids get paid, and then of course Homeboy Industries, with the idea that ... if people have jobs, that they’re more likely to be able to straighten their lives up. And I think that’s a very important fact that I really hadn’t thought of. I mean, you think of getting counselors or social workers ... but the fact is, having a job is one of those things that ... gave them the courage to be able to leave a gang.”

Although Bush’s encounters in classrooms and small discussions were choreographed for cameras and reporters, there were rare, unscripted moments that revealed something of her old-fashioned sensibility. At Chipman Middle School in Alameda, she was asked by a student during a round-table discussion what subject she taught when she was a teacher.

“Well, I taught 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade, so I taught really every subject, but reading was my favorite.... I was not a very good math teacher and I think that’s kind of a problem in elementary schools. A lot of -- especially women teachers -- are great in language arts and not so great in math.”

En route to Washington, Bush clarified her remark. “That is a stereotype,” she said, “but I think that actually is also proven.” She also said that her daughter, Barbara, a Yale graduate, is a “math whiz.” “I don’t know where she got it,” said Bush, who is married to a Harvard MBA. “I guess she got it from her dad.”

Higher profile

If polls are any measure, Laura Bush inspires great admiration and little animosity. As of January, she had a job approval rating of 85%. Her husband, by contrast, has a job approval rating of 48% in the most recent CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll.

This, theorize some White House watchers, is why her profile has been so much higher of late, including the comedy routine she performed the other night. The president’s most effective campaign trail surrogate, she raised about $5 million during the election, and still makes time to fill Republican coffers. Last week, for instance, she stopped by an intimate Republican National Committee fundraiser at the sweeping Brentwood mansion of mall developer Rick Caruso. She stayed for about an hour; the RNC took in $400,000.

But she wants to be known for more than her fund-raising prowess. Betty Ford is identified with the fight against breast cancer and her support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Rosalynn Carter chose mental health as her issue. Nancy Reagan will be remembered for her anti-drug crusade and Barbara Bush for literary efforts.

This fall, in conjunction with the president’s Domestic Policy Council, the first lady will host a “Helping America’s Youth” conference, where she hopes to bring together experts who work at steering children away from risky behaviors and rehabilitating those who have strayed. In several recent speeches, she has promised that the conference “will introduce a new assessment tool to help communities identify the challenges that they face, and the services that already exist to meet them.” The tool is being developed with an alphabet soup of federal agencies.

This week, after a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps, Mrs. Bush left with her husband on an official visit to Europe. And though she did admit to reporters on her plane last week that she is having fun these days, it’s probably safe to say she has left the one-liners at home.