Re: ugnet_: Scared of Wife having 2much money?

[Anyomokolo]

Ed, what is the point of having so much money without sexual freedom? Historically, marriage is intended to take that away from a woman. Besides, this is America and the public figure thing also counts. First lady? So what? I would strive for my sexual freedom.  

 

Kironde, if I had that kinda money, you would see power written all over my face. I got power now but...

Anyomokolo.

 

Ed Kironde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Kerry's gold

She's rich, clever, outspoken (in several languages) and she's got money ... lots of it. And if she has anything to do with things, she'll be America's next First Lady, wife of a Democrat President

Edward Helmore
Sunday January 25, 2004
The Observer

Last week, as she has done every week since the presidential election season began last March, Teresa Heinz Kerry was campaigning for her husband. But she was not campaigning with her husband.

Unlike the typical templates for political wives - those such as Laura Bush, who know their place at their husband's side, or those such as Hillary Clinton, who have their own agenda to advance, or even those such as Dr Judith Steinberg, the wife of Howard Dean, who has avoided the spotlight altogether - Heinz Kerry runs her own discrete show in support of her husband. She has her own schedule, her own staff in Washington and her own private plane when needed, called The Flying Squirrel.

She doesn't wear campaign buttons and sometimes even forgets to introduce herself as a presidential candidate's wife. On a recent tour of Latino businesses in Manchester, New Hampshire, the French-African owner of a barbershop, who'd been swapping stories with her in French about growing up in Africa, said she hadn't mentioned her husband was running for president. But, said Victor Mbuyi, 'her French was very good'.

If her spouse of nine years, John Kerry, goes on to win the White House, she will make a First Lady quite unlike any America has seen before. Portuguese by birth, she was raised in Africa and educated in Switzerland. Spont aneous and independent of mind; candid and direct to the point of being impolitic, she is like her husband, a pro-choice Roman Catholic. And she is independently wealthy, to the tune of $550 million, from her first marriage to the late senator John Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune. She remains a power in her own right as head of the Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies, a charity with a billion-dollar endowment that gives away millions each year to environmental, educational and health causes.

It is a shared passion for the environment that brought John Kerry and Teresa Heinz together. They met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where she had been sent as delegate by the first President Bush. That was 12 months after John Heinz, a potential presidential candidate himself, died in a plane crash. She and Kerry subsequently bonded after he recited a prayer - in Latin - at a Mass they both attended.

To friends, the couple are ideally suited and it is a marriage of equals. For his part, Senator Kerry seems unfazed by, even celebrates, his wife's individuality and honesty. His prospective First Lady, he says is 'nurturing and incredibly loving, and fun, zany, witty ... definitely sexy. Very earthy, sexy, European.'

Within and beyond the borders of the US, the still glamorous THK, at 65 years old, offers a refreshing and worldly perspective for a US politician's wife. The daughter of a prominent Portuguese doctor, Heinz Kerry, née Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, grew up in Mozambique. She attended a school run by British nuns, and later studied Romance languages at senior school in South Africa, where she became involved in the nascent anti-apartheid movement of the late 1950s. At university in Geneva, she was a classmate of Kofi Annan at the city's School of Interpreters. Now fluent in five languages, she graduated and went to New York to become an interpreter at the United Nations, before marrying Heinz in 1966. 'I had no ambition,' she once said. 'I thought of myself as being married and having children, which is what all the ladies did.'

That's no longer the case, if it ever was. When the results in New Hampshire come in on Tuesday night, Mrs Heinz Kerry may become a singularly important figure. 'It's not an easy choice to do this, and she feels it is important,' says spokeswoman Christine Anderson. 'But she doesn't want to be involved in policy per se or hold an official job. She would rather keep working on the issues she cares about. She wants to keep her job to run the Heinz Endowments, and she would keep doing that if she were First Lady.'

Those who know her well say she is generous to a fault and, for someone who could easily have everything done for her, is well able to look after herself. 'She's a powerhouse in her own right, not just a plus-one,' says her god-daughter and Vogue magazine writer Jill Kargman. 'She has her own causes and, instead of just standing beside him, she can get up and captivate an audience as well as any politician. She doesn't have an agenda, or secret political aspirations of her own; she just truly wants to make the world a better place.'

In doing so, Mrs Heinz Kerry is not afraid to speak her mind. With the perspective of an admiring foreigner, she often speaks of the demise of America's reputation abroad. 'I understand why so many of our friends around the world are so mad at us,' she said at a recent event. 'We have let them down. In a democracy, the one thing that cannot be done is to destroy its trust, its hope, its idealism. This administration is the most cynical, the most venal, the most Machiavellian administration in my 32 years in Washington.'

At the start of John Kerry's campaign, Democratic strategists were not sure if Teresa Heinz Kerry would be an asset or a liability. Some predicted she would help soften the stiff and awkward public image her husband had acquired; others feared she would prove too contemporary and sophisticated, her Chanel heels too high to appeal to the stay-at-home wives of the Mid-West.

And there were incidents that alarmed her husband's handlers. Asked if he still had nightmares of combat, Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, said he hadn't. His wife said otherwise, and mimicked him having a flashback. 'Down, down, down!' she screamed. And there were minor breaches of Beltway etiquette. In an Elle magazine profile, she enthused about her Botox treatments, the benefits of green tea and her late husband, John Heinz III, to whom she was still referring as 'my husband'.

She was reported as fidgeting while Senator Kerry made speeches, of interrupting him, of failing to gaze at him adoringly in the accepted manner. On the subject of marital fidelity, she said: 'I used to say to my husband, my late husband, "If you ever get something, I'll maim you. I won't kill you. I'll maim you".' And asked whether she would take her husband's name, she shot back: 'Politically, it's going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don't give a shit, you know? There are other things to worry about.' And she added: 'Swearing is a good way to relieve tension'.

The joke in Republican circles goes that every time the couple, who are sometimes known as 'Cash and Kerry', retire to bed, Kerry is fundraising. In fact, under campaign finance law, individual donations are capped at $2,000. When the Kerry campaign was floundering last autumn. it was Kerry who mortgaged his Boston townhouse to raise money and has said he won't spend any Heinz money on a campaign - and she says she won't offer it - unless the Bush campaign engages in 'character assassination'.

Democratic strategists say they would not want to turn her into a robotic Stepford Wife even if they could. Consultant Hank Sheinkopf believes Heinz Kerry could help close the gender gap in US politics and get out the female vote - indeed, the size of Kerry's win in Iowa last week was predicated on women voting for him. In so far as Heinz Kerry helped in that win, it bodes well for gaining support in key swing states that Democrats must win to carry the election - Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. 'We're not living in 1955 anymore and she can typify and force the turn-out of women on the issues women are interested in, like healthcare, education and the environment.'

Teresa Heinz Kerry

DoB: 5 October 1938 (Mozambique)

Education: BA, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Family: Two stepdaughters, three sons from her marriage to John Heinz

Jobs: Interpreter, United Nations; chair, the Howard Heinz Endowment

 

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