Opinion: Secret revealed! What Laura Bush and Michelle Obama <em>really</em> talked about

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Closets.

No, really.

According to First Lady Laura Bush, whose taped interview with Cynthia McFadden appears on ABC’s ‘Nightline’ tonight, there were no personal problems and no weighty issues of state discussed when First Lady-elect Michelle Obama visited the White House recently with her daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Michelle did not ask Laura for any advice. Had she, Bush said she would advise presidential parents to ‘err on the side of privacy for children.’

‘I think that lets children grow up and make childish mistakes which, of course, they will out of the limelight. And I think that’s really the best.’

Bush said the two mothers talked about ‘what any women would talk about as one is moving out of a home and one is moving in.’

Bush told Obama the White House has great closets.

The two Bush daughters, Barbara and Jenna, showed the two Obama daughters their bedrooms and offered advice on acclimating to new schools and new friends, as well as the confining Secret Service protection, which the Bushes had known since the days their grandfather was president.

‘They’ll be fine,’ said Barbara. ‘They’re really cute, smart girls.’

The full interview, taped while Laura Bush (with Barbara) was on the last solo foreign trip to Panama as first lady, is scheduled for airing tonight on ‘Nightline.’

Closets.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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