Entertainment

STEPPING OUT FROM BEHIND THE BUSHES: TEXAS GOV’S WIFE BRACES FOR CAMPAIGN SPOTLIGHT

MANCHESTER, N.H.

THERE’S one thing you have to ask Laura Bush straight off. How does she – the self-professed ‘most private” member of the Bush family – feel about her possible public role as the wife of a potential U.S. president?

‘I feel worried a little bit but really not that much,” says the wife of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican front-runner in the 2000 presidential race, as she sits on a sofa in a shivery-cold hotel conference room.

‘I feel very at ease about it, and I think George does too. Whatever happens, we’ll still have a life at the end of it. Both of us feel fairly comfortable with ourselves,” she says.

You can’t help but believe her from the way her shoes are casually kicked off and her stockinged feet tucked up underneath her so there’s just a glimpse of pink-painted toenails. She is trim and auburn-haired, with a generous smile. She has – as everyone comments – beautiful, big sea-blue eyes; she projects a sense of deep calm.

It’s no wonder that, in the code of the Texas Rangers who guard them, his name is ‘Runner” and hers is ‘Reader.”

She says it’s deliberate that they didn’t bring along their 17-year-old twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna – named for grandmothers Barbara Bush and Jenna Welch – on their first campaign swing this week.

‘They [the twins] really don’t want to [come along], I don’t think, and at the same time we really don’t want them to,” she told The Post. ‘Their whole life – either their grandfather was vice president or president, or their dad has been governor – we’ve never asked them to do campaign events with us.

‘They’re not running for office, and we want them to have as much privacy and as normal a childhood as they possibly could have.”

They’ve already started dating, she adds.

Laura Welch Bush, 52, is the librarian and schoolteacher who has been married to George W. Bush for 21 years. He tells every crowd that she was ‘the best decision I ever made.” Does she like that? ‘Well, that’s really nice of him. And he was the best decision I ever made, too. We’re really happy we found each other.”

Her staff adores her and says she never loses it. Laura Bush says she’s ‘pretty even” – but people who smack chewing gum drive her crazy. (‘Mainly it’s Barbara and Jenna who are the ones that are smacking gum.”)

She grew up in Midland, Texas. So did he. They were even in the same seventh-grade class at San Jacinto JHS, ‘but we barely knew each other,” she says. She was an only child, serious and shy.

In eighth grade his family moved away to Houston. Years later, as young singles, they lived in the same Houston apartment complex – when he was flying jets in the Texas Air National Guard and she was teaching – but never met. Her friends say she had lots of boyfriends.

Finally, when both were 31, she was home in Midland visiting her folks, and friends fixed them up over barbecue – ‘I think our friends wanted to fix us up because we were literally the last two people left who hadn’t married of all our friends.”

He says it was love at first sight. She says, more carefully, that ‘we liked each other right away.”

Did she know that he was the one right from the start? ‘I don’t know if I knew it that night, but pretty shortly after that.” They were married just three months later.

The Bushes had already applied to adopt a child when, three years after they married, she became pregnant. Asked what she wants people to know about her, she starts by saying: ‘I’m a mother of twin 17-year-old girls.”

Her husband has made it clear that it was for her that he quit drinking almost 13 years ago, when he turned 40, because he knew he was partying too much – though he won’t give specifics.

But a few years ago his wife was quoted as saying: ‘He thought he was funny. Isn’t that what every drunk thinks?”

It is, those around them say, a real love match. In the middle of a crowded political room, they glance over at each other. He smiles at her when he reaches for her hand to walk up the stairs to their charter plane. Some political couples only seem affectionate when the TV cameras turn on. Not the Bushes.

And there are no Clintonesque rumors about his private life.

Is she worried about the risk of another Sexgate in the Oval Office? ‘Oh no, not really. I don’t envision that happening.”

Maybe that’s why she can grin when asked why her husband does better than almost any other Republican with women voters – ‘I think it’s just because he’s so cute.”

But she quickly adds: ‘I don’t know, really. It’s probably not my influence. I don’t think I can take credit for it. I’m glad he does. He likes women. I think it’s obvious. He has a very strong mother. He has two daughters. I think he likes women. He feels comfortable with them.”

In her, Laura Bush says America would get a ‘very active” First Lady stressing education, literacy and libraries – not so different from the childhood issues now stressed by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, but even closer to Barbara Bush’s push for literacy.

So would she be more like Barbara Bush or Hillary Clinton? ‘I think I’ll just be like Laura Bush,” she says.

As Texas’ First Lady, Laura Bush says she loves traveling around to highlight special local programs, working on prenatal care, pushing for teachers to teach pre-reading skills (her husband wants Headstart to teach phonics), raising money for libraries and promoting Texas writers.

Until her husband got into politics she says, black jeans were what she liked to wear, and she seems to favor pantsuits for campaigning – but yes, she also wears designer clothes.

How about the bright cornflower-blue skirt and top she’s wearing now? She says she isn’t sure and asks an aide to peek at the label. It’s designer – Escada.

In her free time she loves to read, to fish for largemouth bass and to walk. She didn’t keep her premarital pledge to jog with her husband – but then, he broke his pledge that she’d never have to give a campaign speech.

She says the Texas governor’s mansion isn’t exactly a formal or high-fashion place, what with sports-loving twins who have ‘a lot of great friends,” one dog and three cats (one is a stray who was adopted after the dog treed him and barked to brag about it).

Recently Laura Bush brought the twins to New York, and since both are on the hunt for colleges, they toured Columbia and NYU.

They also saw ‘Les Miz” (again) and ‘The Lion King” (‘we thought that was really fabulous”). Their ‘Death of a Salesman” date was canceled because Brian Dennehy was sick.

The Bushes may be multimillionaires (thanks to the oil business and baseball’s Texas Rangers) but Laura Bush does the cooking at the governor’s mansion on weekends – usually Tex-Mex, like enchiladas and tortillas and beans.

‘I like to cook, but I’m not a good cook. I’m mainly a good cookbook reader,” she says.

So far, Laura Bush mostly appears at campaign events as a silent, smiling partner at her husband’s side, but she was the star when they read to little kids in New Castle, N.H.

He did fine, but the kids really paid rapt attention when she was the storyteller, reading ‘Officer Buckle and Gloria,” about safety tips from a cop and his dog.

The two Bushes played off each other. She told the kids that the dog looked ‘a little sheepish.” He quipped: ‘For a dog.”

Last Christmas, George W. Bush gave his wife a ceramic model of the library at Southern Methodist University, her alma mater. It was to say he’d donated money to build a peaceful flowery promenade there in her honor.

At the dedication, he said it was ‘a serene and patient place, just like Laura.”