Opinion Mark SteynThe antidote to John Kerry is Mrs John Kerry, if she'll forgive the designation. Teresa Heinz is the last person on the Kerry team to remember the days when a John Kerry campaign appearance meant a campaign appearance by John Kerry.
Now it's like the title song of Hello, Dolly!, but even longer and with a bigger cast - thousands of state officials, veterans, designated human-interest victims of the "special interests" and paunchy fellow senators frantically prancing around the stage as they anticipate the arrival of the Great One. Eventually, after several hundred choruses of what a great president he'll make, they trill, "Well, well, hello, Kerry!" - and there he is.
Then he goes into his solo - five minutes of boilerplate populism which somehow manages, in Kerry's groggy delivery, to take the best part of an hour. And through it all, Teresa stands by his side looking bored out of her skull. For Kerry, the good news is she doesn't look like a woman who'd be bothered by an intern scandal. The bad news is she doesn't look like a woman who can be bothered with a spousal presidential campaign.
The Kerry campaign is so cynical it wouldn't surprise me to discover that Teresa Heinz is a throaty, sensual continental actress the strategists spotted and hired to play the loose- cannon wife who can't stay on message. "Look, fellers, we got the rubes and hicks wrapped up with the 'I'm fighting for you against the powerful interests' stuff. But how about we hook in the postmodern crowd by having a sophisticated European standing alongside rolling her eyes at the vapidity of modern vernacular politics? We'll put her in one of those over-the- shoulder Isadora Duncan scarves and every time he drones "BRING! IT! ON!" she can lower her chin into it to look like she's suppressing her giggles. If she gets it right, the columnists'll go, 'At least there's one element of the Kerry campaign which isn't just the usual pandering populist phony-baloney.' Any ideas for the exotic background?"
"How about a Portuguese Mozambican ketchup heiress?"
"Hmm. 'The first Portuguese Mozambican ketchup heiress to serve as First Lady.' Maybe it's a little too obvious."
But, incredible as it seems, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is a real person. A decade ago, after the death of her first (Republican) husband, Mrs Heinz politely declined to run for his Senate seat. Well, not that politely. As she put it, "Political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises."
And how! In the graveyard of ideas, for the last two years she's been interred in the biggest mausoleum in the grounds. Kerry had enough money to hire top gun strategist Bob Shrum, but Shrum could find nothing in his repertoire to palm off except the same old populist platitudes that proved so successful for all his previous presidential candidates: President Dick Gephardt (1988), President Bob Kerrey (1992) and President Al Gore (2000).
"We need to offer solutions, not just slogans," intones Senator Kerry. That's how much a straight shooter he is. His slogan is a slogan about the inadequacy of slogans.
Teresa is said to be fluent in five languages, but, alas, populese is not one of them. When it gets to the singalong bits of the Kerry stump speech, when he warns Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Ketchup (whoops) and the other "powerful interests" that own the current Oval Office that "We're coming. You're going. And don't - let - the - door - hit - you - on - the - way - out!", Teresa mouths along randomly, with evident distaste.
It's said that she and John fell for each other at an environmental conference in Brazil, when Mrs Heinz noticed that the Portuguese interpreter was not translating the speech entirely accurately and offered to do it herself. How one longs for her to do the same at a Kerry event! "I'm on your side against the powerful special interests that stand in your way!" Simultaneous translation for those who don't speak Shrumish: "He's saying he's on your side because he took in more money than any other senator from the powerful special interests that stand in your way so he can afford to hire the most expensive campaign operatives who nevertheless found him so lacking in any kind of plausible political persona that they were unable to do anything for him other than fob him off with the same fighting-for-the-little-man stuff that bombed for Prince Albert four years ago."
How one pines for her to do, as she did for a Washington Post reporter, her impression of John having one of those Vietnam flashback nightmares that he claims he never has, a lively vignette ending with Teresa yelling "Down, down, down!" Perhaps in the event that he gets unusually animated on stage - admittedly a long shot - she can leap forward to pat his head and soothe him back to sleep. Down, down, down!
Gazillionaire populists seem to be the only kind of Democratic candidate around these days. In such a world, one treasures a woman who can't be bothered pretending she's on your side. At campaign stops in New Hampshire general stores, she'd try on some goofy North Country headgear and roar with laughter about whether she should wear it to the inauguration.
Is there a better line this campaign season than her response to White House jibes that her husband is "French-looking"? "I bet they can't even speak French," she sniffed. In its tone-deafness to the demands of democratic politics, that's pure delight.
Teresa's on our side against the powerful special interests of Big Faux Populism that stand in our way. I can't think why she married John Kerry, but love is a mysterious thing. If the current campaign slogan "Dated Dean, Married Kerry" prevails, she looks to be getting more fun out of the latter half of the equation than most Democratic voters. Then again, unlike them, she has a pre-nup.
Mark Steyn's column was held over yesterday for space reasons