Imagine for a moment you could accurately say the following things about the wife of the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency.

Her personal net worth is actually thought to be between $1 billion and $3.2 billion, according to the Los Angeles Times.

She was a member of the opposite political party until her husband decided to run for president.

She has five homes, worth at least $30 million.

She often speaks to audiences in a rambling, barely coherent manner.

I imagine Laura Bush and her husband would be mercilessly pilloried in the press were such things true about her.

When applicable to Teresa Heinz Kerry, however, these same traits are lauded by liberal sympathizers such as Sandeep Kaushik, political writer for the alternative weekly The Stranger, in Seattle.

At least Kaushik lays it out plain to see, allowing readers to understand just how far out of the mainstream is Heinz-Kerry.

She is the closest thing we have to an aristocrat in America....Her ability to forge an emotional bond with voters--particularly upscale, liberal, feminist, educated women, the sort who flock to Patty Murray's annual Oprah-esque Golden Tennis Shoe fundraisers--is in marked contrast to the policy-heavy speechifying of her husband.

She was in Seattle last Friday raising money, her second visit in recent months, and her talents were on full display. With her soft, accented English and stream-of-consciousness style of public speaking, she again projected an unusual--and sometimes, frankly, strange--mix of European earthiness and American therapy-tinged confessionalism.

She combines, in one diminutive package, the hearth-and-home emotionalism of latte liberal motherhood with the unconscious paternalism of the mega-philanthropist. She would be the perfect first lady for Seattle, a town where new money comfortably supports communitarian liberal virtue. Had she been born in the Victorian era, she would no doubt be leading some sort of rich women's crusade to improve the hygiene of the poor or raise standards of sanitation in the slums.

Instead, as she imparted in a rambling, self-revelatory talk at a Kerry fundraiser in May, she is concerned with "broken cities." It is, she continued last week, "amazing, interesting, hard but hopeful work." This rhetorical style, of stringing together emotionally resonant adjectives, is a signature Heinz Kerry trait. Washington is a "progressive, thoughtful, beautiful state." It is important to be "enlightened, hopeful, persistent, and you have to believe in yourself." She talks of "wellness" and "safety."

She loves Seattle because of our beautiful trees, she said in May, a bizarre digression that prompted some of my male colleagues to speculate that she loves certain psychotropic plants as well. They openly worried that this sort of seemingly random, off-the-top-of-her-head wittering might harm the campaign.

My colleagues are right that Heinz Kerry can be weird, but they are wrong to see this as a liability. Women voters will tolerate a bit of strangeness from her, because they believe that the rich are not supposed to be like them, and because Heinz Kerry is always genuine, even when she is occasionally incoherent. She is living proof that in the American electoral process authenticity trumps logical consistency.

With her "unconscious paternalism," the "aristocratic" and "strange" Heinz Kerry would indeed be "the perfect first lady for Seattle."

Couldn't have said it better myself. May she make many, many appearances in many, many places before Election Day.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at July 24, 2004 09:28 AM

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