There must be a rule that says every State of the Union speech must have a jarring, incongruous moment that comes out of nowhere. Last year's was President Bush calling for steroids testing in Major League Baseball.

This year's came when the president announced that his wife, Laura Bush, would lead a national effort to reduce gang activity in urban America. The first lady smiled sweetly, acknowledged the applause of official Washington and accepted the first great charge of her husband's administration -- stewardship over a $150 million, three-year program to assist at-risk youth from ages 8 to 17.

If some thought that Hillary Clinton's tackling health-care reform during President Clinton's first term was a stretch, the prospect of Laura Bush, the soft-spoken librarian from Crawford, Texas, lecturing Crips and Bloods about the evils of gang-banging is a "Saturday Night Live" skit waiting to happen.

Without a doubt, the first lady radiates empathy and concern for the disadvantaged. Among all of her husband's advisers, she is the one whom we most easily can imagine relating to society's outcasts in a noncondescending way.

But for as nice a woman as she must be, Mrs. Bush wouldn't be our first choice for heading up a federal anti-gang initiative. The government's gang czar should be someone with street credibility and a whole lot of law enforcement experience. For all of her admirable qualities, Mrs. Bush has neither.

Street gangs and the pathologies that create them are a complex phenomenon in modern America. Anyone who takes them on needs to be more than "a good role model."

Niceness is no substitute for experience with the conditions that drive young people into violent gangs. An initiative without that kind of know-how at the top is doomed to operate on only a symbolic level. The president obviously loves his wife, but he didn't do her any favors by putting her in charge of such an important effort. What's next -- Barbara and Jenna Bush running the Department of Education?