Bush: Youth, favor with the press help Michelle Obama avoid typecasting

Former first lady Laura Bush said in an interview aired Sunday that first lady Michelle Obama has been spared the typecasting as a traditional, homemaker-type she received in the White House.

Bush, on “Fox News Sunday,” said there were a lot of reasons why the media cast her in that role for eight years.

{mosads}”I think because I had had traditional jobs, I’d been a — women’s
traditional jobs, I’d been a teacher and a librarian, and then also
because I was married to a conservative president,” Bush said. “And so because of
that, you know, that was just the view that people had of me.

“And it’s
sad, really, and sort of frustrating that our — that the press in
general typecasts every woman that lives in the White House, the other
first ladies, because always our first ladies have been a lot more
interesting, a lot more complicated, than their box that they’re sort
of put in.”

Bush said Obama hadn’t been subjected to the same manner of typecasting.

“I don’t think so, really. I think that she’s — and maybe this is just
her age, that she’s younger,” she said. “But I think she’s been given the benefit
of doubt more by the press than former first ladies.

“Certainly, look at the way Barbara Bush — mother, grandmother — was
typed as a grandmotherly, you know, type woman, when, in fact, Barbara
Bush is as strong as horseradish and people really know that.”

Bush, who is promoting her new memoir, “Spoken from the Heart,” also said there was “absolutely” liberal media bias against then-President W. Bush.

“And my real reluctance when George decided to run for president, when
he was thinking about running for president, was that we knew from
having watched the way Mr. Bush was characterized in 1992 that that’s the risk you run,” she said, referring to her father-in-law.

Bush said their marriage helped George W. Bush weather the stressors of the White House, including continuous terror threats after 9/11.

“We really had mainly this feeling of comfort in each other’s presence,” Bush said.
“Just the comfort of being with each other was what propped us both up
emotionally.

“We knew we already and always had each other, the
emotional support of each other.”