There's not enough alcohol in the world to make me agree with Peggy Noonan on this:
Michelle Obama's speech was solid, but not a home run. First impression: She is so beautiful. Beautifully dressed, beautifully groomed, confident, smiling, a compelling person. But her speech seemed to me more the speech of a candidate, and not a candidate's spouse. It was full of problems and issues. I continue to be of the Dennis Thatcher School of Political Spouses: Let the candidate do the seriousness of the issues, you do the excellence of the candidate. This is old fashioned but nonetheless I think still applicable. It has made Laura Bush (with a few forays into relatively anodyne policy questions) the most popular First Lady in modern American political history. Another problem with the Michelle speech. In order to paint both her professional life and her husband's, and in order to communicate what she feels is his singular compassion, she had to paint an America that is darker, sadder, grimmer, than most Americans experience their country to be. And this of course is an incomplete picture, an incorrectly weighted picture. Sadness and struggle are part of life, but so are guts and verve and achievement and success and hardiness and…triumph. Democrats always get this wrong. Republicans get it wrong too, but in a different way.
I think Laura Bush has benefited by comparison. Compared to her husband, she's a relatively rational, sensitive human being. And perhaps, by the term "modern", Noonan is limiting it to 21st Century First Ladies. Okay, but Hillary seemed VERY popular this primary season. Jackie Kennedy was more popular. Period, end of story, and if people don't believe it then they don't know the 60s and 70s. Lady Bird Johnson was very popular in her day. Nancy Reagan seems to be loved by a lot of Republicans.
The one thing that Noonan is bragging about here with Laura Bush - that there are no political or social accomplishments for her that Americans can think of beyond being married and devoted to George W. Bush - is the thing that is going to drag her down if she continues to act this way. Because people dislike George W. Bush very, very much, and he's going to receive a lot of the (deserved) blame for the pain we'll go through as a nation trying to correct the problems he's exacerbated or created, and if she doesn't have her own star to shine, she's going to suffer along with that.
Especially if she gets anywhere as defensive as her mother-in-law.