October 30, 2000

Children who avoid the limelight
By Toby Harnden
lineone.net

GEORGE W BUSH'S twin daughters have insisted on keeping their distance from his presidential campaign.

Barbara and Jenna Bush, 18, have remained almost unseen in recent months even though Al Gore's children, Karenna, Kristin, Albert and Sarah, are frequently with him.

Barbara, named after her grandmother, the former First Lady, is the more studious of the two and has just begun her first year at Yale, her father's alma mater. A brunette, her classmates voted her "most likely to appear on the cover of Vogue".

Jenna was known as "doughnut girl" at school because she treated friends to snacks. She was voted "most likely to trip on prom night" before her high school graduation.

Since appearing with the rest of the family at the Republican convention in August, the twins have kept out of the limelight. Mr Bush has explained that he and his wife Laura wanted them to have a life "as normal as we can possibly make it".

He said: "Part of that normalcy is to keep them out of the glare of the lights, is to not make them campaign if they're not comfortable with it, not force them on to the stage, so to speak. And if that's the way they like it, that's the way I like it."

Mr Gore's daughters Karenna, 27, and Kristin, 23, regularly campaign for him, while Mrs Gore has praised him for continuing to watch Albert Jnr play American football every Saturday. At a rally in Louisiana last week, Mrs Gore said: "He has made every single one of our son's football games. I don't really want to share that with everybody. It's personal. But it matters."

Mr Bush is more fiercely protective of his children and has decreed that they are not to be interviewed or photographed.

When he was riding high in the opinion polls before the summer, he told a story about the twins catching him reading a newspaper. " `Dad,' they say, `don't believe everything you read. You're not nearly as cool as the people think you are'."

Almost Mr Bush's only good words about Bill and Hillary Clinton have been to praise them for shielding their daughter Chelsea from the public eye.

There was tension in the Bush family in 1998 when Karla Faye Tucker, a murderer who became a born-again Christian, was due to be executed.

According to family friends, Jenna dropped her fork dramatically at the dinner table and said she was against the death penalty.

Some aides advised Mr Bush to grant a stay of execution, but Tucker was killed by lethal injection two days later.

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