Maybe 30 years from now, when Jenna is president and mother Laura is touring the country on her behalf, she'll have this public speaking thing down as well as her mother-in-law does now. But here in 2006, if you were to rank the Bush first ladies - as I'm about to do - it wouldn't be hard to do.

Barbara Bush by a mile.

Laura Bush didn't exactly do anything wrong public-speaking-wise when she appeared at the Inn at Essex in May. Didn't drool, didn't stutter. Didn't call the candidate by the wrong name. It's just that she delivered her speech as if she were completing a dreaded school assignment.

Barbara, on the other hand, acted like she was actually having fun Wednesday when she appeared at the Sheraton. She lost her place, had to haul out her reading glasses and shuffle the pages, but made it so none of that seemed embarrassing. She butchered the word adjutant (as in adjutant general Martha Rainville) several times so that it came out as some mushed version of adjunct. Didn't matter. Barbara made a little humor go a long way. As she said, she's been doing this for 40 years.

Perhaps next summer when the Bush clan gathers at the estate in Maine, Barbara can have a heart to heart with her daughter-in-law.

By the way, a day after Barbara Bush raised $50,000 for Rainville's congressional campaign, Democrat Peter Welch's campaign sent an e-mail to supporters urging them not to allow this advantage. "He needs your support today because he will make sure we don’t send another friend of the Bushes to Washington," the Welch letter says.

- Terri Hallenbeck

(Photo by Alison Redlich/Free Press)