But is there any chance the Mrs. Bush will be a candidate?

"She's not running," a spokesman for the first lady told WorldNetDaily. "She's been asked before, and she's said no before."

Laura Bush broke out of her husband's shadow earlier this month as she skewered George at the correspondents' dinner, which was broadcast nationally on C-Span.

Her comedy debut drew plenty of laughter while raising some eyebrows. In her joke about the male horse, Mrs. Bush stated:

"I saw my in-laws down at the ranch over Easter. We like it down there. George didn't know much about ranches when we bought the place. Andover and Yale don't have a real strong ranching program. But I'm proud of George. He has learned a lot about ranching, since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What's worse it was a male horse."

Some saw the joke as a harmless jab at her husband's perceived intelligence. But others were offended, believing it smacked of bestiality.

Laura Bush recently conducted a political fence-mending tour of the Middle East, where she placed a prayer note in the Wailing Wall, and visited the Dome of the Rock, a site holy to Muslims, and met with a variety of government and religious leaders.

In the week of this month's evacuation of the U.S. Capitol due to an errant small plane, the first lady spoke her mind about the delay in notifying her husband, who was told of the situation 50 minutes after the evacuation began, after a bike ride.

"I think he should have been interrupted,'' Mrs. Bush said, adding quickly, "but I'm not going to second-guess the Secret Service that were with him.''

She even stood up for Newsweek magazine, which has come under fire for its Quran-in-the-toilet story.

"In the United States if there's a terrible report, people don't riot and kill other people,'' she said. "And you can't excuse what they did because of the mistake – you know, you can't blame it all on Newsweek.''