Michelle Obama's First 100 Days

She is something new in the White House. Take it from someone who has met and known First Ladies over five decades, from Mamie Eisenhower on.

Michelle Obama is the first product of a women's movement sensibility, if not its ethos. Like her husband, she is not rooted in how things were before the 1960s, and her amazing popularity reflects that change.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, she has not pushed openly into policy but, unlike Laura Bush, she has not stayed in the shadows as the traditional supportive but invisible wife.

"First Lady in Control of Building Her Image" headlines the New York Times, noting, "The image that Mrs. Obama is projecting, however, fails to fully reflect the multifaceted first lady. A Harvard-trained lawyer and former hospital vice president, she is also a tough-minded professional who cares deeply about influencing public policy and sometimes promotes legislation at her events. Her top aides, for example, are often immersed in policy discussions in the West Wing that are not publicized by the White House."

What this misses is that Michelle Obama is the first woman secure enough to present herself as a full-time wife and mother, as a partner who has temporarily put aside her professional self, at first to help her husband campaign and now govern the country.

The public is responding to this authenticity underlying her promotion of gardening, child-rearing and other domestic concerns, sensing how far she has gone beyond First Ladies who traditionally exercised power through pillow talk.

Unlike the Clintons who touted a two-for-one presidency, the Obamas are offering a couple working together under a 21st century definition of gender equality, taking different roles in apparent comfort with them and each other.

Inaugural Dress Code

What won't Change on the night of January 20th is the traditional fear of showing up at the ball wearing the same dress as someone else, but the Obama generation even has an answer for that.

A web site called Dress Registry allows Inaugural Ball goers to record what they plan to wear and avoid the embarrassment Laura Bush endured in 2006 at a Kennedy Center do when she showed up in a red Oscar de la Renta only to discover three other wearers of the identical creation. (Tactful as always, she retreated and came back in a black dress.)

The rolls are filling up fast with designer names, colors and descriptions (plunging, strapless, etc), along with photographs to help the "Yes We Can" generation avoid an "Oh no!" moment when they celebrate the beginning of a new era in Washington.

As any student of democracy can tell you, equal doesn't necessarily mean the same.

Lowballing Bush Memoirs

Laura Bush was on Fox News yesterday, probably the last in a round of appearances to drum up interest in her memoirs.

For some reason, publishers have not been bidding up any proposals for Bush nostalgia, even those of the relatively popular First Lady.

"One question that seems to be weighing on prospective editors," the New Yorker reports, "is whether a book by Mrs. Bush will provide a candid account of her feelings, and perhaps counter the popular view of her as an opinion-free robot."

Candid? What world are these publishing people living in? White House memoirs deal in self-justification, rewriting history and sometimes revenge (pace Nancy Reagan), but candor is never on the menu.

If it were, what we would most want to hear from Laura Bush is not about the White House years, but how she married a middle-aged drunk and straightened him out, a creditable feat for a spouse but a disaster for the country.

But the chances of learning that from her are about the same as getting a primal scream from Hillary Clinton over living with a skirt-chasing jerk before and after moving to Washington.

As a one-time book publisher, I was an unsuccessful bidder for Lady Bird Johnson's "A White House Diary," one of the few successful examples of the genre. (LBJ himself was too depressed to finish his own memoirs. As he told Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was collaborating with him, "They'll get me anyhow, no matter how hard I try. No matter what I say in this book the critics will pull it apart. The reviews are in the hands of my enemies--the New York Times and the Eastern magazines--so I don't have a chance.")

Somewhere in the future, the outgoing President will no doubt pocket umpteen millions from his publicist Rupert Murdoch for a work of fiction about the Bush years. But the book I would really like to read is Dick Cheney's "Dear Reader: As I Was Saying to Pat Leahy..."

Michelle Obama's Transition

In the White House, she will be both a working wife and a stay-at-home mom, trying to give her daughters as normal a childhood as they can have living with the eyes of the world always on them.

Even their new pet won't have a dog's life. In a 1963 interview, JFK told me with bemusement, "We got more letters about the puppies born here than the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty."

Michelle Obama has always been "a working mom," her friend Valerie Jarrett said on Meet the Press Sunday. "She knows how hard it is to manage being a mom, a spouse, have a professional job...Her first priority as she comes to Washington and moves into the White House are those two darling girls, making sure that they are OK, getting them in school, getting them comfortable. Her mom, Mary Robinson, is coming with them, and so she'll have her hands full."

Beyond that, according to Jarrett, "her interests will be work-life balance, volunteerism, military spouses. And she'll go from there. But having a seat at, at the table and being a co-president is not something that she's interested in doing."

In the light of Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama's decision to stay out of policy-making will no doubt draw a lot of attention, even more than did leaving her job to spend full-time on her husband's campaign.

As she pursues her "work-life balance" in the White House, the new First Lady will need all her abundant equanimity to keep family life as private as possible. In yesterday's visit, she got some advice from Laura Bush, who managed to do it very well in a time of turmoil.

Bravely Facing the Bushless Years

The keyboard keys are soggy with tears at the thought of no more Bushes in our national life after almost three decades, but George W. and Laura are consoling us with the prospect that Jeb may save us.

In interviews this weekend, the departing President and First Lady tried to ease our sense of loss.

"Well, we've got another one out there who did a fabulous job as governor of Florida, and that's Jeb,” W. said. “But you know, you better ask him whether or not he's thinking of running. But he'd be a great president."

Mrs. Bush was just as sensitive to the emptiness we are all feeling. "One of the reasons George and his brother, Jeb, served in office is because they admired their father so much," she said and when asked whether that meant her husband was not the last Bush, responded: “Well, who knows. We'll see."

Those with long memories are still nostalgic over grandfather Prescott Bush who entered the Senate over half a century ago, starting a tradition of public service for the family whose banking activities helped finance Adolf Hitler’s war machine for World War II.

What will we do without another Bush to pull us all together in a profitable effort to defeat the nation's future enemies?

Bushes' Backward March on Birth Control

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows but can lead them to do kinky things when they get there.

In 1947, George W. Bush’s grandfather was the first national campaign treasurer for Planned Parenthood, and three years later Prescott Bush’s advocacy of birth control led to his close defeat for a U.S. Senate seat in heavily Catholic Connecticut.

This month, his grandson named an opponent of birth control to be in charge of all the government’s contraception programs. Susan Orr, head of population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, will be overseeing activities that she has been denouncing for years.

In 2001, she pushed a proposal to stop requiring health insurance plans for federal employees to cover birth control on the grounds that ”fertility is not a disease.”

It would be easy to write off her appointment as another sop to the Pat Robertson-James Dobson wing of the Republican base, where Ms. Orr previously labored. But there is a more interesting question in all this:

As a lame-duck, Bush has no political self-interest in placating them. As a human being, he has a wife, mother and daughter who are on the public record in favor of freedom of choice for women, to say nothing of his grandfather’s advocacy.

What drives him to this automaton-like appointment that goes against overwhelming public sentiment as well? If we knew the answer to that, we might begin to understand how George W. Bush in two decades went from the failed son of a wealthy but public-spirited family to a destroyer of so many basic values in American life.

First Ladies in a Fix

The Washington Post today ruminates about the role of Presidential spouses and concludes that they, well, differ from those of the past.

They sure do. In half a century as an editor, I knew First Ladies from Eleanor Roosevelt to Nancy Reagan, both of whom wrote for me. They differed from one another back then, too, but what they had in common was, after Mrs. Roosevelt, they had little to say about policy issues--in public.

But now, according to a professor of government quoted by the Post, “there is a greater acceptance of assertive women that is consistent with other societal trends. But there is still a divide in the country in what people want and expect. Look at how much people like Laura Bush."

First Ladies were in a bind back then, and they still are today. How much resentment of Hillary Clinton comes from the fact that in 1992 she said she was not the little woman who bakes cookies and stands by her man? She wasn’t, isn’t and is now running for President on her own, but some voters will never forgive her for not being Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan.

For other spouses, it’s still like walking a tightrope. Shouldn’t Michelle Obama have kept her high-powered job instead of helping her husband? Is Jeri Thompson too involved in Fred’s campaign? Is Elizabeth Edwards too outspoken? Does Judith Giuliani ring Rudy’s cell phone at the wrong time? What gives with Elizabeth Kucinich’s pierced tongue?

Today some of them will be talking about all this on TV with Maria Shriver, who as the wife of Governor Arnold and the niece of Jack Kennedy, knows a little something about the subject.

In 1960, when I sent a reporter to interview her aunt, Jacqueline Kennedy, she sounded like a Stepford wife: "The most important thing for successful marriage is for a husband to do what he likes best and does well. The wife's satisfactions will follow...If the wife is happy, full credit should be given to the husband because the marriage is her entire life."

She never deviated from this submissive line, but even then, it wasn’t simple. When the reporter was about to leave, Mrs. Kennedy looked him in the eye and said, "But I'm smarter than Jack, and don't you forget it."

Raw Material About Bush

What were they expecting when the White House gave Robert Draper access to George W. Bush? A tame Bob Woodward? A Texas sycophant? A good old boy who would be influenced by the fact that the President’s father had been an honorary pallbearer at his grandfather’s funeral?

When Karen Hughes brought Draper in, the working title of his book was reassuringly positive, “The Consequential President,” not the mordant “Dead Certain” that has now been published with revelations about Bush’s attempt to blame L. Paul Bremer III for disbanding the Iraqi Army, his hope for progress there so his successor would have to “stay longer,” the First Lady’s distaste for Karl Rove and other embarrassments.

But in a White House obsessed by loyalty, it may have escaped them that Draper, although proposing to provide “raw material” for history, was an experienced journalist who might not reward access with flackery.

One sign of the Administration’s current disarray is the failure so far to get into gear to discredit Draper’s book. With Rove gone and Tony Snow on the way out, the passion to spin it all away is not what it used to be.