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Got medication?
Laura Bush's unintentionally revealing moment
BY ADAM REILLY
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2004, NEW YORK -- Is Laura Bush okay? I ask this question only partly in jest. If you don’t like our president, it’s easy to make fun of his wife, what with her carefully coiffed hair and demure manner and endless references to reading, reading, reading. But if I had a neighbor who looked the way Laura looked at Madison Square Garden Tuesday night, I’d wait for the right moment and then ask her—as tactfully as possible—if everything was quite all right. Consider the First Lady’s eyes. There’s something strange about them: they’re glassy, vacant, lacking some vital spark. The Stepford Wives reference springs to mind, and offers a handy put-down for anyone troubled by the ominous undercurrents of George W. Bush’s folksy discourses on values. But that’s too easy. Instead, Laura’s eyes strike me as the eyes of someone who’s coping --who’s suffered a bad break, and is getting intense psychoanalysis or some kind of pharmaceutical assistance to keep it all together. On more than one occasion Tuesday, Laura’s eyes shimmered their weird shimmer a bit more than usual. Then, just when it seemed she might start actually crying right there at the podium, the First Lady fought through it, completed her thought, and smiled a relieved, childlike smile. Sometimes this hint of emotional struggle made sense, like when she lauded the sacrifices of military personnel and their families. Sometimes — say, when she was spreading the good news about increased minority home ownership — it didn’t. Then there was her pacing, which was S-L-O-W. Excruciatingly so, in fact. They say teleprompters are tough, but Laura’s an old hand at this by now. Still, for whatever reason, she sounded less like a literacy crusader than a middle-aged woman who’d just learned to read. To further complicate matters, Laura Bush’s speech offered hints that — unlike her husband, if the last four years are any indication — she’s a thoughtful, intellectually curious person. For instance, the First Lady name-checked Vaclav Havel, the brilliant playwright-turned-dissident-turned-Czech president, and related a comment he’d made to her about the nature of democracy. I don’t know this for sure, but my hunch is that George W. Bush doesn’t give a fuck what Vaclav Havel has to say about democracy. Laura also deviated from the America-Can-Do-No-Wrong script that’s dominated the Republican Convention so far. "It took almost 100 years after the founders declared that all men are created equal for America to abolish slavery, and not until 84 years ago this month did American women get the right to vote," she reminded the audience. The crowd, not quite getting the point, started applauding. Undeterred, Laura pressed on: "Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them." A few minutes later, after her speech was done, Laura exited the stage in a hurry, walking away with her back to the crowd instead of milking her moment in the spotlight. In a Bush-Cheney ’04 video the Madison Square Garden crowd saw before Laura’s remarks, George W. Bush — who seems genuinely smitten with his wife — said the best reason to re-elect him is so Laura can have four more years as First Lady. Maybe he knows something we don’t. But judging from last night, four more years is the last thing Laura Bush needs.
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