Bake sales

"If President Bush is a guy many people would like to join for a non-alcoholic beer, as political imagemakers like to say, Laura Bush's is seen as a woman with whom you could chat comfortably in the grocery checkout line, someone likely to offer you a coupon she's not going to use."

Wasting no time, the Tribune hurls another piece of #@%! [registration required] in the ongoing shorthand on "character." We'll be hearing this for the next eight months from the so-called liberal media (SCLM). Bush is the kind of guy you'd like to go to a B-B-Q with, Laura's a sweet-natured person with whom you could imagine joining a book club. And John Kerry and his wife? He's a brahmin with nothing but condescension for "real Americans," and she's, well, she's a weird rich foreigner.

But the Trib story is especially egregious (thanks, by the way, to Atrios for the link). It might as well have been written by Karl Rove, as it is so clearly structured to appeal to the base (she has no intention of "meddling" with policy or "sharing the limelight with her husband" -- the anti-Hillary), while at the same time shoring up collapsing support among women and independents (she's intellectually curious and much less conservative than her husband; she even -- gasp -- disagrees with her husband sometimes, but won't say about what.)

"When the president is asked about education and student testing, he riffs on 4-year-old talking points that include a dissertation on 'the soft bigotry of low expectations.' LauraBush can hit the talking points, but she also can detail a child's learning curve and the possibilities of successful intervention for illiterate middle-school children.

"During her time in the governor's mansion, she launched a book festival in Texas that continues today. She started a national book festival on the National Mall in Washington. While her husband courts the conservative Establishment, Bush on Monday is to play host to a White House salute to writer Truman Capote, a counterculture icon."

Hmmm, the screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a "counterculture icon," huh? No, folks, that's code for "she even feels comfortable around gay people," so don't worry about her husband's plan to enshrine discrimination in the U.S. Constitution."

"Bush acknowledges that her politics sometimes diverge from her husband's conservative ideology, but she has no intention of pointing out where and how.

"...She defended her husband's call for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, while acknowledging that she and her husband have gay friends. 'They ought to welcome the debate,' she said of gays who say the amendment would relegate them to second-class citizenship."

And, of course, she doesn't bake cookies. Seems to me when Ms. Clinton said something like that she was excoriated in the SCLM.

Prediction -- we're going to be seeing this story played over and over as the Bush/Cheney campaign drones on and on.