Susan Estrich
Wednesday, Nov. 24, 2004

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  It was not to be.

There were two problems with her speech at the Democratic convention in Boston. The first and most obvious one was that it was all about her, literally not mentioning her husband at all, which prompted my colleague Chris Wallace of Fox News to dub her "Evita Peron."

The second and more serious problem was that no one from the campaign would ever have approved a speech that didn't talk about John Kerry, and what a great husband and father he was.

Certainly, it's one thing to try to use a first lady's speech, as the Bush campaign did, to try to convince the world that the president thought long and hard about important decisions (Laura saw him through the window struggling with his decision to go to war in Iraq). But certainly, one would have expected Mrs. Heinz Kerry to do what she had done on other occasions – to talk about how her husband had played a strong role in the lives of her sons, who had lost their own father; to talk about what he was like as a father to his own daughters; to talk about what he was like as a husband. At least that.

What was clear, then, since no one could have approved such a speech, was that she was listening to no one; that no one could tell her anything. In presidential politics, particularly in a general election, no one is ever prepared for what happens to them; no one knows everything; the people in the most trouble are the ones who think they do.

Of the eight principals in the campaign, the four candidates and the four wives, Teresa Heinz Kerry without question got in the most trouble. Her supporters would say that it is because the press was gunning for her. Her convention speech, certainly, announced her as a target. And then she provided the ammunition.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry made headlines on a number of occasions for sounding off to the press, sometimes with reason. But she also called voters "idiots," when they didn't agree with her health plan, and is remembered for questioning whether Laura Bush, former teacher and librarian and full-time mother, had ever had a real job.

I remember a woman turning to me, after that remark, and asking: What did she do, but marry two guys, one of whom died and left her a billion dollars?

The truth is that Mrs. Heinz Kerry has done a great deal more than that, including running a major foundation in the years since her husband died. But it is a measure of the damage she did to her reputation in this campaign that the woman speaking was a Kerry supporter and a natural Teresa ally, who had been turned off by the sense that Teresa had not been a team player in this campaign; that she is an egocentric, arrogant, full-of-herself, spoiled rotten witch, with a checkbook, who thinks that just because she's rich she's smarter than anybody else.

If that's not the real Teresa Heinz Kerry, she needs to do some real work to step forward.

COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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