From Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged:
I guess the thing that sticks in the memory for me regarding Barbara Bush was how she had spoken about the Hurricane Katrina survivors who had been displaced by circumstance; they were “underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” It was, if not racist (who knows to what extent she was looking at this through the lens of race?) at least deeply classist. She was privileged, and she could only see silver linings because she did not understand how desperate it was for people to lose literally everything they had. One thing you could say about the former First Lady–she was blunt, and she did not go out of her way to camouflage her meanings. If anything, she was highly articulate and sharp-tongued. It was hard to say she “misspoke” when she held forth.
This isn’t the sort of thing one normally thinks about when considering a political wife–the spouse of a president and mother of another. The stereotype of the political “helpmeet” is inoffensiveness, but that was not really Mrs. Bush’s style.