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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (1708)	2/11/2004 11:49:04 PM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

Hopeful first lady has touch of sauce From The Times 12feb04 ONE of the US's wealthiest women is standing in Chanel shoes in a roadside motel amid one of the nation's poorest regions, telling a room full of Democrats in her lilting, faintly exotic Portuguese accent why she first fell in love with America during her African childhood. "I got to see Some Like It Hot," says Teresa Heinz Kerry. "And I thought Americans were funny people, with men going up trains in skirts, and this beautiful girl, Marilyn Monroe, who was very funny. And America started to take shape in my mind." Quite how Mrs Heinz Kerry is taking shape in the minds of Americans as they start to consider the possibility she will be their next first lady is a fascinating spectacle. Judging by the reception of voters in the Collinsville Quality Inn in southern Virginia, her bluntness, foreign mystique and outsider's view of the US are proving a revelation. John Kerry says his wife would make an "extraordinary" first lady. Few of the Vietnam War hero's political rivals agree with much of what he says, but nobody has denied that. Mrs Heinz Kerry's life story is a Hollywood scriptwriter's dream, and little about her fits the stereotype of a candidate's wife. Heiress to the Heinz tomato sauce fortune, fluent in five languages, fiercely independent, often seen fidgeting and yawning during her husband's speeches, she is unscripted, passionate, unpredictable – and has emerged as one of the key factors in rescuing Senator Kerry's campaign. Last year, his aides were frantic about the damage she was doing to his ambitions, after some of the most entertaining interviews ever given by a candidate's wife. Profiled in Elle, she volunteered information that made Democrat strategists shudder: her Botox shots and the prenuptial agreement she made Senator Kerry sign before their 1995 marriage to protect the $US500 million fortune she inherited from her late husband, Republican senator John Heinz III. She persistently referred to her late husband, who died in a plane crash in 1991, as "my husband", and refused to use the name Kerry. Then she appeared to pick an argument with Senator Kerry in front of another interviewer. But Senator Kerry bet his wife's eccentricities would appeal to voters, and transform his image as an aloof patrician. He was right. "Teresa basically forced undecided voters to take a look at John Kerry," says Democratic adviser Donna Brazile. Now using the name Kerry and assiduously referring to her first husband as "late", she flies around the US in a red-and-white jet telling people her life story and why her husband would make a wonderful president. His time has come, she told the working-class audience on Monday night. "I think of him as a late, great maturing wine, just ready for sipping." Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira was born in Mozambique, the child of wealthy expatriate Portuguese parents. She studied languages in South Africa and marched against apartheid. She speaks quietly, but her audience is enthralled. She was studying in Geneva in 1962 when she met Heinz, who was on holiday from Harvard Business School. He told her his family made soup. They married in 1966 and had three sons. Heinz became a Republican senator, and in 1990 introduced his wife to Senator Kerry on the steps of the US Capitol. A year later she was widowed. Long divorced, Senator Kerry was linked at the time with a series of glamorous younger women, including actresses Catherine Oxenberg and Morgan Fairchild. After a few more chance meetings, the senator and the senator's widow started dating in 1993 and married two years later. Mrs Heinz Kerry, 65 to her husband's 60, runs the Heinz family's $US2 billion philanthropic network. She is passionate about the environment and children's issues. "Man, she was awesome, dynamic. She needs to have a show on national TV," said Sam Gamble, in the audience on Monday night. A Kerry aide replied: "We tried to script her in the beginning, but she wouldn't do it. It's turned out much better that way." theaustralian.news.com.au