Kerry turns to better half

[Feanorcurufinwe]

With her wild, flyaway hair and casual manner, she is the anti-Kerry, as comfortable in a Dominican barbershop as she is in the brown suede heels she wears on a walking tour of this city's small Latino neighborhood.


<snip>

Her ease is so clearly a matter of temperament, not political calculation, that she disarms even those most prepared to dismiss her in this three-block enclave of bodegas, Latin restaurants, and gift shops.

"She better not come over here," says Gary Fisher, a jocular black man having his hair trimmed by Tomas Barrera, the proprietor of the six-chair establishment. "I support the man in the White House."

When she does find her way to his chair, Heinz Kerry is nonplussed when Fisher warns her not to waste her breath, that he is a Republican. "So was I until last December," she replies, catching off guard the federal employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs who is unfamiliar with her background. Married for 25 years to John Heinz until the GOP senator from Pennsylvania died in a plane crash in 1991, she married Kerry in 1995 but kept her late husband's name and party affiliation until Kerry launched his presidential bid.

"So, you are a convert by marriage," Fisher scoffs good-naturedly. She laughs but also describes the moderation that she thinks has been eclipsed in the Republican Party by a divisive shift to the right. President Bush still has Fisher's vote, but Heinz Kerry has made an impression. "Smart," says Fisher. "Real," says Barrera, who, 21 years after emigrating from the Dominican Republic, has yet to become a citizen, let alone a voter.

<snip>

Once a thriving Greek neighborhood, the area has taken on a more Latin flavor in the last decade but is not exclusively populated with Spanish speakers, as Heinz Kerry discovers at the Don Quixote restaurant.

Greeting a man at the counter in Spanish, she is rebuffed in accented English. Recognizing a native of Haiti when she hears one, Heinz Kerry switches seamlessly to French. The disarmed diner smiles and shakes her extended hand.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2003/11/23/kerry_turns_to_better_half/

[Byronic]

1. What a First Lady Teresa would make

She really is a terrific person. Good God, what a difference a Kerry White House would be from this one. The Squatter's administration seems to revel in its own cultural isolationism.

Teresa Heinz Kerry would be a huge breath of fresh air, with her internationalist outlook (5 languages? Bush couldn't name 5 nations without a teleprompter) charm (there is a great story of when she spoke to a crowd of cartoonists and so won them over that one wrote an article entitled 'Teresa Heinz I Love You'), wit, passion for the environment and numerous other causes, her steely determination and her irreverence, the days of Chimpy and Pickles would just seem like a bad dream.


From Bob Rogers article on Teresa:

"Here is a list of the top five things to remember when drawing my husband, John Kerry: Number one, when you think of our next Democratic president of the United States, remember, he does not have blond hair."

A cartoon of Hillary Clinton was then projected on a large screen.

She went on to explain that her husband should not be depicted as a groundhog, a basset hound, or coming out of a Heinz ketchup bottle, each time pointing to a cartoon example of what not to do. She encouraged us instead to remember Kerry's "dignified stature, his noble chin, his focused gaze, and his compassionate smile." In other words, "draw him like this":

An adoring, Mt. Rushmore-like sketch of John F. Kennedy appeared on the screen.

She had them eating out of her hand. I was falling in love.

The rest of her speech was amazing (although I'm surprised I remember any of it since I was daydreaming of Teresa and I sipping lattes in a Paris cafe reminiscing about our recent work reducing greenhouse gas emissions).

http://www.robrogers.com/aaec03/hlove.html