Thursday, Sept. 30, 2004 | 9:40 a.m.
Laura Bush said she has seen her husband cry under the enormity of loss during the war in Iraq, and she said she watched him struggle through the "long build-up" to the war.
But in a sit-down interview with the Sun, Bush mostly talked about the president's belief that Iraq and Afghanistan soon will be democracies -- two steps, she said, "in making sure that the civilized world can join together to defeat terror."
"It's very difficult to deal with," the first lady said, "but he truly believes, and I do, too, that we're doing the right thing, that the world's better off with Saddam Hussein in a jail cell."
Her husband is expected to hammer that point in tonight's first presidential debate, when the candidates will discuss foreign policy issues. In her visit to Las Vegas this week -- her third to Southern Nevada this year -- Bush expressed confidence that her husband's unwavering position on Iraq ultimately will appeal to the American people.
Sure, she said, there are daily difficulties that weigh on her husband's emotions. He receives threat and casualty reports every day, and he often comforts families who have lost a relative in military service.
But the months-long decision to go to war was the toughest decision, and she said she realized the weight on her husband's shoulders once when she watched him from a White House window.
"I would look out the window and see him walking out on the lawn," she said. "Because he is the president, because he is the commander-in-chief, he's the one that has to make that decision.
"It's the hardest decision a commander-in-chief ever faces, and some fortunately don't ever have to face that decision. But I know how agonizing it is."
After making a stop for a Tuesday evening rally in Henderson, Bush stayed Tuesday night at the Ritz-Carlton at Lake Las Vegas.
Prior to her Wednesday morning interview with the Sun, her staff cautioned that the first lady often runs ahead of schedule, mostly because Bush and her husband stay on Washington, D.C., time even when they travel the country.
True to form, Bush arrived a few minutes early and made a beeline to pour herself a cup of coffee. She had started the day at 4 a.m., she said, with a call to check on the president at their ranch in Crawford, Texas.
He was already up, she said. Bush has maintained his strong faith while in the White House, reinforcing it with his morning routine of reading devotionals, she said.
"In the morning, he gets up and brings me coffee," she said. "And then he reads that in bed and then we read the newspapers. That's an important part of starting the day for him.
"I think it's really a good way for a lot of people to start the day with a time of meditation or a time of devotion, and in this job, as you look in history, you see that most presidents also relied on their faith."
Lately, she said, the president has been studying the devotional writings of Oswald Chambers.
Chambers, a Scotsman who lived from 1874 to 1917, was a Christian minister. In one of his books he wrote: "The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world. ... Every now and again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax. That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life, or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God -- (our) Utmost for His Highest."
The Bushes are currently giving their utmost to campaigning. This is their fifth and final campaign. George W. Bush ran once for Congress, twice for governor in Texas and, now, twice for the presidency.
Laura Bush often tells a story on the stump about how she and her husband agreed when they married that she wouldn't have to campaign for him. Crowds laugh at the young couple's naivete.
But the real irony is that Laura Bush has evolved from a bookish teacher to one of the most effective tools on the campaign trail, where Democrats and Republicans alike give her high favorable marks, according to several polls.
Her proudest accomplishment of the first administration, she said, was her contributions to the No Child Left Behind act. It raised the bar on education while pumping the most money ever into primary and secondary education, she said.
She said she doesn't understand teachers who complain that the education reform wants special education students to meet requirements that would be almost impossible. And she said the measure doesn't ask too much of teachers that are now undergoing extra training to become highly specialized.
"Just as we expect our students to be organized and to be focused and to be disciplined, we also expect that from our school districts," she said.
Districts can look at ways to leverage money to re-train teachers, such as conducting after-school or Saturday academies, she said.
And new research that the administration is tracking should help teachers better teach children to read, including in middle school or even high school, where troubled readers are more likely to drop out of school, she said.
Bush said that when she graduated college with a teaching certificate in 1968, she didn't know how to teach children to read and needed more training.
"I've traveled around the United States, that's what teachers want to do," she said. "They want to be effective."
Henderson was just one of several stops in a pre-debate Western sweep for the first lady, who then traveled to Clovis, N.M., for a small rally before going to Albuquerque. After that she was to head to Miami for the debate.
On the campaign trail, she was one of the first to come out and say she thought the documents produced by CBS news that claimed her husband shirked his national guard duties in Vietnam were fake.
But Bush said it's her daughters who get upset when the mud flings in the midst of tough campaigning.
"George and I don't," she said. "We really don't pay that much attention to it. The girls, I think, it bothers them. Of course they adore their dad, and they don't like to read things about him that they know are obviously untrue or characterizations of him that they know are not right."
Still, she pointed out, her twin daughters were just 4 years old when their grandfather became vice president, forging the family into the public eye.
The couple tried to shield their girls from the political spotlight through their college years, but that changed this spring, when the twins called President Bush and said they wanted to be able to tell their children someday that they had worked on their father's last campaign.
The first couple enjoy their daughters' company and sense of humor on the trail, though Bush said she does worry as they increasingly become public figures.
"Sure, that's why we protected them all those years before in every other political race," Bush said. "But they're grown up now and this was their choice. And I'm glad they chose it."
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