OPINION-EDITORIAL

Barbara Bush

We’re going to miss her

The Reagans had been in office eight years, and a massively successful eight years they were. But as athletic and dashing as Ronald Reagan had been in his youth, he was very much a buttoned-down president when he reached the White House. Suits and ties. Meetings that ran on time. Call him conservative. And Miss Nancy was so formal and well-known for her (high) style that she herself had to poke fun at it at the Gridiron.

The Reagans were more paternal than fraternal. Proper. Official. As P.J. O'Rourke once put it, the Reagans were lah-di-dah, especially her.

The Bushes were, well, sorta Texan. George's syntax made for a perfect foil on Saturday Night Live. And Barbara Bush wore fake pearls. She told everybody she wore fake pearls.

As the press fawned over Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbacheva in the early 1990s and later Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore, we remember the time when Barbara Bush finally took on the glamour girls. At some convention or swearing-in, she walked around the podium and told the world to look at her--white hair, simple dress, fake pearls and all. And, she thundered, this is me. Take it or leave it.

We the People took it. As high as her husband's approval rating would get in the early part of his presidency, hers always ran just ahead of his.

Barbara Bush's most famous speech came at Wellesley College in 1990. Imagine the big three networks all going live to a First Lady's speech. No doubt they expected fireworks.

Barbara Bush was asked to give the commencement address there, which turned into a PR problem when some students protested. They said, on the record and in writing, that they didn't want a speaker at their college who had only become famous because of a spouse. Ouch. Kids can be tough.

Combine that with Barbara Bush's habit of telling it with the bark off, and no wonder TV producers hooked up a live feed. But what Barbara Bush did instead was deliver one of the best speeches given by a modern First Lady, talking tenderly about family values and marriage, talking plainly about kids and the importance of parents, and quoting the poet, Ferris Bueller, who was big with the kids back then.

Then she said she hoped that, in the audience that day, there was another person who could marry somebody successful and one day live in the White House as the spouse of a president.

"I wish him well," she said, to cheers.

Somebody said Barbara Bush was as authentic as her pearls were fake. We believe it.

Often enough, somebody will ask aloud what's missing in Washington these days? Answer: The same thing that's been missing for two decades: Civility, honesty and Barbara Bush.

She will be missed. Sorely.

Editorial on 04/20/2018

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