Laura Bush, Out of the Garden and Into the Fray

LAS VEGAS, May 18

You come here to Sin City, with its slots in the airports and its sexpots beckoning on every bus-bench ad, you get a floor-show welcome, even as a first lady admired for gentility.

Before her first solo rally of what she has come to call, a little wistfully, "our last campaign," Laura Bush got a warm-up Tuesday from the Palo Verde High School Choir, with dancing singers changing costumes so frequently they seemed to be hoping "American Idol" judge Paula Abdul secretly watches C-SPAN. One of their numbers was "Swing Dancing," performed perhaps in honor of this swing state, in presidential play with its five electoral votes.

Then came a man who could have been wearing a Wayne Newton mask, with that spray-tanned face and jet-black hair, except he was Wayne Newton, heralding the wife of President Bush as "this gorgeous lady." He loosened up the crowd with a long joke about a surgeon who performs a miracle, stitching back together what's left of accident victims, only "a horse's butt and a man's mouth," creating -- and here Newton paused for effect -- "that guy [who] is running for the Democratic nomination for president."

That really got them whooping it up here in the performing arts center of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It made for a hard act to follow.

In other introductory remarks, Lynette Boggs McDonald, a Clark County commissioner, commended the first lady as a woman who has "brought back dignity and grace to the White House. She has no interest in seeking her own headlines or making policy," an assertion that brought the crowd of about 1,000 to its feet with wild cheers. Laura Welch Bush is no Teresa Heinz Kerry or Hillary Rodham Clinton, and to listen to this audience, that is exactly what people love about her.

And here was one man's reaction: "I know nothing about her," said Lawrence Larmore, a computer science professor at the university, attending the rally on his campus. "She's just the wife of the president. She could become a Democrat, and I'd still vote for the president."

Once, decades ago, she was. Tuesday, Laura Bush emerged on the stump as the most intimate observer of the very qualities that are her husband's strongest positives for his supporters -- his steady resolve in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and his war against terror, even as, back in Washington, his administration struggles against the sense that the Iraqi occupation might be lurching toward failure.

"I want you to know about his positive agenda," Mrs. Bush said, trim in a top-stitched denim suit and black slingbacks. "I know that you see what I see. The president is a steady leader. He is hopeful about the future because he has tremendous confidence in the American people. He has a good and compassionate heart. I've known George Bush for nearly 30 years, and I've found that for every second of our time in the White House, that the president has the courage and the character to meet the demands of this time."

The president's approval ratings are at the lowest in his presidency -- in the mid-forties -- and a Gallup poll of last week found that 58 percent of those surveyed disapproved of the way he is handling the war in Iraq. Nicolle Devenish, a spokeswoman for the campaign, dismissed with a laugh the notion that Mrs. Bush's first outing came as a result of this pasting in the polls.

University officials said they had been contacted for the first time two weeks ago by campaign officials seeking to rent the auditorium for the first lady's visit. "We feel fortunate to have whatever events she agrees to do," said Devenish. "When our focus was involved in raising resources, she was helpful. Now we have shifted to getting our message out."

In her remarks, Mrs. Bush touted the administration's tax relief package, crediting it as the engine of the "fastest economic growth in 20 years." She talked up the education reform effort of the No Child Left Behind Act, Americans' talent for "compassion and ingenuity" and heralded her husband's foreign policy initiatives, which she said had allowed women and girls to walk freely in Afghanistan and had liberated millions of people in Iraq. While she touched briefly on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the first lady used this reference to emphasize that "the pictures we saw recently do not reflect the character of our troops, who have conducted themselves with honor and compassion."

A day after the president of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated by a suicide bomber right at the entrance to the highly secured Green Zone, only 43 days before the United States is determined to turn power of government over to the Iraqi people, Bush hinted that the media is not presenting a true picture of gains made in that country. Troops, she said, "have rebuilt over 1,000 schools" in the country.

In the president's stump speeches during his bus tour of four other swing states two weeks ago, he consistently told his audiences that one of the best reasons to reelect him is to ensure his wife is first lady for another four years. It's the biggest applause line every time.