Jenna Bush has finally grown up — so claims the American Prospect in its recent review of Jenna’s new book, Ana’s Story, the biography of an HIV-positive teen mother the president’s daughter met while working for UNICEF in Panama. It would be easy to rustle up familiar stories from Jenna’s sordid youth or quote from the book’s supply of less-than-elegant prose, as others have, but the Prospect instead chose to focus on the incongruity between W.’s policies and those of his more enlightened daughter:
As her father threatens to veto the entire $34 billion 2008 foreign aid budget just because congressional Democrats have finally snuck in loopholes providing condoms and abortion services to women in the developing world, Jenna is on a nationwide book tour and media blitz, spreading the message that safe sex and education are some of the most important tools in fighting disease.
Good for Jenna! I wonder if she inherited a progressive streak from her mother. Laura was a Democrat before marrying a Bush and even veteran leftist Alexander Cockburn once called her “the frail hawser linking G.W. Bush to reality.” In Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, Laura is seen obliquely voicing misgivings about the Iraq war. And just this summer, the First Lady publicly broke with her husband when she told CNN that condoms are “absolutely essential.” Like mother, like daughter.
—Justin Elliott
