America Conor O'CleryWhen Teresa Heinz Kerry was introducing her husband at a rally in Milwaukee on Monday, a Bush supporter shouted through a bullhorn: "Four more years! Four more years!" Mrs Kerry retorted: "They want four more years of hell." The crowd laughed and shouted: "Three more months!" with Mrs Heinz Kerry joining in. This pretty innocuous exchange has since been taken up by opponents of the Kerry campaign as yet another disastrous case of "Teresa being Teresa".
The American Spectator said she was being "grounded". It also reported that when dining in a Wendy's recently she "was unable to identify a single thing on the menu she was willing to eat, and ended up pointing at a picture of Wendy's chilli.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh told his listeners: "This billionaire wife, this Teresa Heinz, this woman is out of control, ladies and gentlemen." He also made a meal of the Wendy's story, saying it showed Mrs Heinz Kerry to be out of touch with the common people. The 65-year-old philanthropist may indeed not be used to fast-food dining, having inherited $700 million from her first husband Senator John Heinz, but she is no stranger to personal attacks. Even her name and foreign background are grist for ridicule.
"Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is a big hit in Europe, as if a native of colonial Mozambique has unique insight into the pathologies of the American experience," wrote Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. Mrs Heinz Kerry is finding she has to be as tough as her secret service code-name, "mahogany".
If she sticks on message she is described as "scripted" and if she speaks her mind she is "out of control". She let slip her frustration when she told Colin McNickle of the Pittsburgh Tribune- Review to "shove it" during an exchange at the Democratic convention.
There was more to this exchange, however, than simple rudeness to a reporter.
Colin McNickle is a conservative columnist who declared his job in Boston was to infiltrate the Democratic convention. "It's a dirty job dealing with liberals," he wrote, "but somebody's gotta do it."
The Pittsburgh Tribune- Review, it turns out, is published by reclusive right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Followers of the Clinton sagas will be familiar with the name. When Hillary Clinton talked about a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against her husband, she had in mind the same Richard Mellon Scaife, who traces his ancestry to the thatched Mellon cottage preserved in the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, Co Tyrone. During the 1990s Scaife paid $2.4 million to fund the secret Arkansas Project to discredit the Clintons. According to a Washington Post article in 1999, Scaife and his family's charitable entities had by then given at least $340 million to conservative causes and institutions, giving him "a disproportionate impact on the rise of the right, perhaps the biggest story in American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century". In his biography My Life, Bill Clinton accuses Scaife of using his money to fund negative stories against him, such as the $10,000 paid to a state trooper for a "ridiculous yarn" accusing him of drug smuggling.
Scaife funded the Landmark Legal Foundation which advised Paula Jones. He recently donated $1 million for a new public policy school at Pepperdine University in southern California to underwrite a chair for the new dean, Clinton's old nemesis, Kenneth Starr.
Richard Mellon Scaife's newspaper has now taken to regularly trashing the Kerrys (though Scaife's wife, Barbara Ritchie Scaife, is reportedly a friend of Mrs Heinz Kerry and donated $2,000 to the Kerry campaign).
"The dust-up between Teresa Heinz Kerry and Colin McNickle has a long history behind it that goes back a good 15 years before McNickle even worked there," wrote Dennis Roddy, a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
"Scaife has had it in for her because she's not sufficiently conservative, she's a moderate voice. She has always felt badly treated by the Tribune-Review and it doesn't surprise me her grievances finally came out."
Though Scaife and Senator John Heinz of Pittsburgh were both republicans, the publisher turned against him because he was too liberal. Since her marriage to John Kerry in 1995 the couple have been firmly in his crosshairs. Two years after their wedding the paper published an unattributed, unsigned story alleging Kerry was having an affair.
Last year it highlighted a report by the conservative Capital Research Centre that Teresa Heinz Kerry's foundation had helped fund radical liberal groups advocating "environmental extremism", "anti-war protest", and "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy" through donations totalling $4 million to a San Francisco-based charity that channels money to smaller groups. The money, according to the Heinz foundation, was in fact all directed specifically to environmental charities based in western Pennsylvania.
The report, nevertheless, generated a lot of negative coverage, including an attack by Ben Johnson in FrontPageMag, an online publication produced by the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture, headlined "Teresa Heinz Kerry: Bag Lady for the Radical Left".
Somewhere behind all these attacks against Mrs Heinz Kerry is Scaife money. The American Spectator which has been prominent in belittling her, and which so inspires Rush Limbaugh, is heavily under- written by Scaife: the Spectator was the chief beneficiary of his $2.4 million for the Arkansas Project. The Capital Research Centre, which produced the report on her foundation, is also funded by Scaife. So too is the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture. So too is the Hoover Foundation which employs the author of the Wall Street Journal article quoted above.
John Kerry's wife did not handle the situation well at the Democratic convention but in the circumstances her comment of "shove it" was mild. Indeed it pales compared with the infamous retort made in 1981 to reporter Karen Rothmeyer of the Columbia Journalism Review, when she asked an interviewee about his funding of conservative groups. "You f***ing communist c**t, get out of here," he said, adding that her teeth were ugly and she was ugly and her mother was ugly and that she had better not turn her back on him as she left. The person being interviewed? Richard Mellon Scaife.