Kerry told to take wife 'out of the spotlight'
By Philip Sherwell in Miami
(Filed: 03/10/2004)
Democratic election advisers have ordered Teresa Heinz Kerry to adopt a lower profile in the final stages of the campaign by her husband, Senator John Kerry, for the White House because they fear that she may be alienating voters.
Mrs Heinz Kerry, who as the heiress to the Heinz fortune is one of the world's richest women, has been told to keep out of the spotlight because her outspoken and unpredictable manner is regarded as an electoral liability.
Middle-American women prefer Mrs Bush to Mrs Kerry
With less than a month until the election, Mr Kerry is behind George W Bush in the polls, although aides hope that his performance last weekin the first presidential debate will give his campaign a boost.
Mr Kerry drafted veterans of the Clinton White House, including the former press secretary Joe Lockhart, into his team last month to reinvigorate his campaign. They warned that his wife appeared to be costing him votes and have instructed Mrs Heinz Kerry - who was born in Africa to Portuguese parents - to confine herself to mostly low-key events with only small numbers of voters.
"Teresa simply does not come across well to the general public," said a female Democrat strategist. "Part of that is a suspicion of her foreign roots, I'm afraid. But it's also her manner that puts people off and that has been very frustrating. So now her job is to speak to specific and carefully-chosen groups rather than general campaigning."
Earlier in the campaign she caused controversies by telling a conservative newspaper reporter to "shove it", remarking that "only an idiot" would oppose her husband's health reform plans, and calling some of her own critics "scumbags". At one point, speaking to a black audience, she described herself as African-American.
Advisers said that the problem was not just her tetchy outbursts. Her fortune, estimated at about $750 million (£417 million), foreign background and most significantly her inability to play the traditional role of supportive wife were all deemed to be harming her husband's prospects.
Aware that it would be impossible to silence her, strategists instead ordered Mrs Heinz Kerry, 66, to focus on small gatherings of mostly Democrat supporters, where she could galvanise the faithful. "I just have to be a little more responsive," she acknowledged during a recent appearance in Colorado.
She was briefly back in the spotlight on Thursday night when she joined her husband on stage in Miami after the debate with President Bush. At the boisterous post-debate party she raised roars of approval when she asked the crowd: "Did John Kerry rock, or what?"
Next day, however, while Mr Kerry addressed rallies in Tampa and Florida in upbeat mood, his wife was pursuing a series of little-publicised local engagements elsewhere in Florida instead of introducing him on stage, as she would have earlier in the campaign.
Between meeting a group of Cuban pensioners and victims of the recent hurricanes in Palm Beach, she spent an hour at a community centre in Miami's Little Haiti district, a rundown quarter of dollar stores and car repair yards.
Elegantly dressed in a brown trouser suit and pink pinstripe blouse, Mrs Heinz Kerry switched seamlessly between English and French as she asked people about the devastating impact of Hurricane Jeanne on Haiti. Neither she nor the immigrants from the Caribbean's poorest country seemed to find the encounter incongruous, and the audience was clearly delighted to receive such a prestigious visitor.
For a woman who expresses her views so forcefully, her accented but fluent English was surprisingly softly-spoken. "The not knowing is a terrible thing," she said quietly to a woman who explained that eight members of her family were missing and presumed dead after the floods. "I am so sorry for what has happened in Haiti."
Her minders kept her well away from the national media, limiting her to short pre-arranged interviews with local newspapers and television to discuss aid for Haiti.
Mrs Heinz Kerry was born in colonial Mozambique to Portuguese parents with Swiss, French and Italian ancestry. She met her first husband, H John Heinz III, heir to the ketchup empire, in Geneva and inherited his wealth after he died in an air crash.
Her conservative detractors have successfully portrayed her as out of touch with middle America. Although her assertiveness may appeal in Democratic strongholds such as New York and Boston, across much of the country it contrasts unfavourably with the grace, manners and elegance of Laura Bush, the president's wife.
Mr Bush is now attracting almost as much support from women as from men. Suburban women, a key target group of voters dubbed "security moms" by the pollsters, find his wife more reassuring than her rival.
Meanwhile Mr Bush's advisers admit that the president is working on ways to improve his performance before the second televised debate on Friday, after polls showed that Mr Kerry "won" last week's encounter.
John McCain, a Republican senator, said the president realised that his failure to conceal his impatience with his rival had "looked bad".
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/...world.html
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She sounds even worse than Mrs Clinton.
"Molon labe".
Leonidas, King of Sparta,
Thermopylae, 480 B.C.
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