Trouble on the Horizon: The United States is Just Not Ready for THIS!

Let's suppose John Kerry wins the nomination of the Democratic Party to run against George Bush in the fall elections. 

Make a real leap and assume he wins the presidency. 

I know.  That is far-fetched.  But just assume it could happen. 

Here's the problem.  The new First Lady would be real departure from what we usually get. 

See 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, The Guardian (UK), Sunday January 25, 2004

Read this and you'll understand the problem, and see the line of attack that Karl Rove, Bush's best friend and chief political advisor, will take. 

Excerpts:

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. 

Spontaneous 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.

This Bush team is going to make mincemeat of her on all this.  Portuguese!  Born in Mozambique!  With a BA from the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa!  The Bush team is laughing now.  Americans won't stand for this. 

And Latin?  Latin?  What's with that? 

But wait!  It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views.  She's been campaigning for her husband:

... 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'.

Fluent French?  The kiss of death!  We ALL know about the evil French.  French is NOT what they speak in Texas, or anywhere "real Americans" live.  And then too it does appear she temporarily forget to plug her husband's campaign and kind of got sidetracked into a relaxed, personal conversation.  Horrors!

But wait!  It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views.

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.

An old buddy of Kofi Annan?  She worked for the United Nations, those folks who wouldn't support our little war to take over Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein and all those weapons of mass destruction that Dick Cheney said are really, really there - and he said that again THIS WEEKEND at the World Economic Forum is Davos, Switzerland. 

This is going to be GOOD.  Rove is sharpening the knives now!

But wait!  It gets worse, or better, depending on your political views.

... 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.'

Yipes.  She thinks what others think of us matters!  Condi Rice is giggling now. 

And damn, she uses words like Machiavellian!  George doesn't. 

But wait!  It gets even worse, or even better, depending on your political views. 

...  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'.