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While it’s true as John says that the 100-day presidential milepost is media-made, it does afford time to ponder swift and striking changes, such as Michelle Obama’s rise in poll ratings. Less than a year ago, in June 2008, as the Washington Post pointed out in its 100-days section yesterday, Michelle Obama’s favorable rating was 48 percent. Now it’s 76 percent, meaning that this first lady is more popular than Hillary Clinton or Laura Bush at similar early junctures. Andrew Sullivan has acknowledged that Michelle’s “public relations success” is one of the aspects of this time period that surprises him. But last week, poll results from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press provided some clues as to why this has happened. To wit: conservative women like her a lot more than they did this time last year.
You can glean this from one of the center’s fun tricks: one way its pollsters probe the collective unconscious is to ask people a single word they'd use to describe the person in question. Among the top three words used to describe Michelle Obama are three—classy, nice, and intelligent—that were also in the top four for Laura Bush. But while Bush tended to evoke words such as ladylike, quiet, loyal, dignified and pleasant, Michelle Obama is more likely to cause people to say things like strong, confident, smart and wife. (Why in the world “wife” didn’t spring to mind in the case of Bush is hard to imagine, but whatever; Curtis Sittenfeld corrected that.) In the top twenty for Michelle Obama, the only pejorative was “arrogant,” which occurred to seven people, the same number that came up with “awesome,” “mother,” “outgoing,” and “terrific.” Laura Bush’s only pejorative was “invisible.” For some reason, both women prompted a good number of readers to say, simply, “OK.”
But here's where the one-word-thing gets sort of telling: As the Pew analysis points out, in July 2001, “conservative “ was the seventh-most-common word used to describe Laura Bush. Yet out of almost 800 respondents this year, only one person responded to the words “Michelle Obama” with the word “liberal.” Apparently, people see Michelle Obama as non-partisan, which presumably gives her crossover appeal. Someone who came into contact with her on a national service initiative recently described her to me as a “political tiger” who made effective behind-the-scenes phone calls, but the public does not see her as political.
And perhaps because that is the case, the cohort among whom Michelle’s polls numbers has risen most strikingly is Republican women. In January, Pew found, just 46 percent of Republican women had a favorable view of the new First Lady. Three short months later, that figure had risen 21 percentage points, to 67 percent. That’s a big change in a short period of time. To me, this suggests that the first lady's shrewdly tended public image, which emphasizes her family values—mother, wife, daughter, vegetable gardener—has gone a long way toward winning over women of a more conservative bent. Republican men like her better now, too, than they did in January—and a lot better than they did last year—though the change is not quite so striking. So Andrew, I think there’s your answer. Or some of it.
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Melinda,
Thanks for sharing news of Laura Bush's memoir. I'll admit, I've always liked Laura. I don't think it's fair to project our hopes and dreams onto another woman just because she's married to the president. (Meghan's excellent post about Michelle Obama sums up my feelings well.) Yes, it's a position that offers much power, but if a first lady is not comfortable doing big things in the glare of such a bright spotlight, she's not going to be very good at it. Her more traditional first lady role of working to improve literacy and raising awareness on breast cancer and heart disease might not be world-changing, but it suits her.
As for her book, well, I rarely buy memoirs. I find them generally self-indulgent and not terribly revealing. Did we get all the dirt on Bill and Monica in his memoir? Doubtful. If there's anything to be said about Laura's stated intention to write a book that is "positive ... with a minimum of criticism," it's that, well, the honesty is refreshing. So, no, I won't buy it. The vast majority of the reading I do these days is children's picture books, but, if I have energy enough at the end of the day to do more than curl up with my remote and whatever's on the DVR, I'm going to sit down with a novel. (I figure I'm only two or three years behind on the NYT best-seller list.) Would I love to know what life was like in the White House for Laura, and for George, the last eight years? Sure. But I would never expect it to come from Laura.
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Our enigmatic current first lady is ready to write a memoir, and has reportedly promised to refrain from revealing anything at all in it; is that supposed to be reverse-psychology PR? According to the AP, Laura Bush has "vowed to write a positive book, with a minimum of criticism.'' So Rachael, would you buy that book? If she called it, I Read, I Smoke, and I Admire, though, I would pay full price. And for What Was I Thinking? I would pre-order.
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It was striking to see Laura Bush onstage last night after watching Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama speak last week. Laura looked stiff and uncomfortable, despite her smiles; she swiveled her head almost robotically toward and away from the camera, and her eyes had the tight look of someone disconnected from what she was saying. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with some people from Texas who used to know Laura Bush pretty well—and who had liked her. They invoked the usual things people invoke when they talk about who the private Laura Bush once was: a funny, smart jazz lover. A sometime smoker who cared a lot about education. And they said the question all her friends kept asking was: How can she stand by and watch as her husband makes so many bad decisions?
Curtis Sittenfeld's newly released American Wife, a novel about a woman named Alice Blackwell, aims to answer that exact question. Alice is based loosely on Laura Bush. She's a shy, bookish girl from Wisconsin who grows up to be the wife of a jokey born-again former alcoholic who runs for president only to launch a deeply unpopular war. American Wife didn't go very far, in my view, toward dramatizing the inner life of this woman. But it does make you think quite a lot about the peculiarity of being a first lady—an inherently passive role that is both simpler and more complicated than being Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton-as-candidate. In the book, Alice asks herself, "If I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?" Choosing silence at a moment when more and more women are choosing to find their voice on the political stage—and to some degree just succeeding in finding it—must have a special poignancy. Or maybe it's a special kind of complicity. The book did make me wonder what, in her case, I would do. On the one hand, I believe a marriage is a private space; on the other, I wouldn't be able to swallow my own feelings in order to "support" my husband without question in the public eye. I'm curious to know what other XXers think—are you sympathetic to Laura or not? Will the role of first spouse change over time, as more couples with "new marriages" take residency in the White House?
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