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The President and First Lady sent ABC's Charles Gibson mixed messages about their tenure in the White House as they lapse into lame duck status. Bush detailed its burdens: "Until you actually get in there and understand the responsibilities that come with the office you cannot possibly--cannot possibly--comprehend it." As they celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary he speculated that "a weak marriage would be torn apart by the pressures, I would suspect; a strong marriage gets stronger." And then, as they strolled through the woods at Camp David, life did not seem so hard. Laura Bush called the grounds "beautiful…so pretty." George agreed: "Life is pretty comfortable and this is part of the, you know, luxury of being the President, coming up here to Camp David." "What is the hardest thing to give up: this, the White House or the plane?" "Or the helicopter…Yes! What traffic jam? I guess the whole experience has been magnificent."
Gibson (no link) tried to cajole soundbites from the First Couple on Campaign 2008. Apart from the President's certainty that the Republican nominee would beat Hillary Rodham Clinton, the closest he got to breaking down their stone wall was Laura Bush's implicit endorsement of dynastic succession: "If a person has an opportunity in the role of the First Lady to observe the President and what he goes through for eight years, does that experience prepare the person to be President?" "I think you certainly know what it is like," she responded. "It was very helpful for us to have been around the White House as much as we were when his parents served there." Meanwhile on NBC, Andrea Mitchell monitored Rodham Clinton's latest maneuvers in Iowa. The former First Lady's attack on Barack Obama--"with all due respect I do not think living in a foreign country between the ages of six and ten is foreign policy experience"--was "almost identical" to a talking point issued by the Republican National Committee, Mitchell observed. She interpreted an ad from yougogirl.com to "shore up her support among Iowa women" as evidence that Rodham Clinton's rhetoric about her gender "could be hurting her--not winning over undecided women and costing support among men." The public does not know "how difficult it is to run for President," Laura Bush empathized to ABC's Gibson, "how much emotional and physical stamina you need."
Gibson also quizzed the President on foreign policy. Bush praised Pervez Musharraf for having "advanced democracy in Pakistan." He insisted that his policy towards Iran was "to pursue our objectives diplomatically" even though later in the interview he decried Obama's willingness to hold unconditional talks with leaders of hostile nations as "an odd foreign policy." On Iraq, Gibson all but declared that the Commander in Chief's military strategy had succeeded: "I will give you a chance to crow. Do you want to say I told you so?" The President asserted that "grassroots reconciliation is beginning to translate into national changes." NBC aired a report from the grassroots--the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad--by Damien Cave of The New York Times. He introduced us to a couple of librarian friends, Suhaila al-Aasan, who is Shiite, and Afifa Tabbit, who is Sunni. Both had been driven from their homes: al-Aasan can now return; Tabbit, whose son was murdered in the street, has to live in an upstairs room at the library. "There is a lot more hope than there was just a few months ago," Cave found, "yet the more we talk the more I learn that these women are struggling to recover."
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