There is Heinz Field, home of the Steelers football team, the Heinz chapel, with its 23 stained glass windows, the Heinz hall for music lovers, the Heinz Gallery for visual art, and coming soon, in a converted red-brick factory, the Heinz riverside luxury flats.
In the birthplace of an empire built on ketchup and baby food, the Heinz family brand is inescapable, and so it seems natural that the wife of the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, should continue to be known here simply as Teresa Heinz.
Thirteen years after his death her first husband, Senator John Heinz, remains a beloved figure in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania, a moderate Republican who carried every ward of the then solidly Democratic blue-collar town.
The verdict on his widow is mixed. Heinz Kerry’s cosmopolitanism (she was raised in colonial Africa and speaks five languages), fiery temperament and wealth (estimated at £420-m) make her an oddity in American political life.
Although she has inherited some of her late husband’s popularity, and is appreciated for her management of the charitable trusts that have poured large sums into education and the environment, Heinz Kerry has also created a sizeable body of enemies.
”Witch”, said the signs hoisted outside when she appeared this week at a Democratic meeting in rural Pennsylvania. ”Stay out of Greensburg, Witch.”
Here fans say the extreme reaction of some Pennsylvanians is evidence of the state’s conservative streak. In this part of the state, party workers seeking the women’s vote dare not mention abortion rights. Her defenders say the anger she generates is evidence of Pennsylvania’s discomfort with assertive women.
”Here we are in 2004 and women can do anything they like in the world, and we still have these ridiculous expectations about political wives that they should be like Stepford wives,” says Meghan Kelly, an English student and bartender. ”Teresa is the anti-Stepford wife.”
Other women supporters are transfixed by her undeniable glamour. Now 66, Mrs Heinz Kerry is five years older than her husband — a fact she flaunts — and she has a way of flipping back her long dark hair that is age defying.
”The fact that she is in her 60s and thinks she is sexy I think is wonderful for women,” says Ronda Springer, a manicurist in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Outburst
But Democratic operatives remain unconvinced that she is ready for general release. After an outburst on the eve of the Democratic convention last July when she told a columnist from a rightwing Pittsburgh newspaper to ”shove it”, the prospective first lady began limiting her appearances to smaller and generally friendly audiences.
Most have been in Pennsylvania, her adopted home state, where the presidential race is a dead heat and she can draw on the residue of goodwill for her late husband.
It is here that refusal to be moulded into a presidential appendage has set her apart on the campaign trail. While she has loyally campaigned at Kerry’s side since the political season began in January, she is no conventional consort. She refuses to act the role of the perfect placid wife, like Laura Bush, but nor does she radiate the suppressed political ambitions of Hillary Clinton.
She had her shot at politics — she was offered and turned down a Senate seat after her first husband was killed in a plane crash — and says she wants to concentrate on policy, specifically healthcare.
”I would just like to have a little conversation about what it is we are all facing,” she began her address one night early this week in Greensburg.
In a throaty voice, and apparently without notes, she launched into a 40-minute treatise on job security, terrorism, the Kyoto treaties on global warming, her childhood in Africa, the meaning of America, education, healthcare and the cost of prescription drugs.
She refers to her first husband after about 90 seconds. Kerry, whom she married in 1995, gets a mention after 12 minutes. From then on she makes occasional references to both Johns, using only their first names, which is confusing at times.
But she has an impressive memory for statistics, and when she begins elucidating the Democratic plans for guaranteed child healthcare it is clear she knows her subject matter and cares deeply. ”People who lose jobs and healthcare are hit by a double whammy no human being deserves,” she told a gathering at a Teamsters hall in Pittsburgh this week.
She can be disarming. Leaning forward in her chair with elbows on knees, she looks down on the floor as she tells the story of how as a university student in South Africa she gathered her first impressions of the US from the movies — especially Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot.
A moment later, however, she displays an almost breathtaking insensitivity. Sitting beside a man describing with difficulty his battle against Parkinson’s for the past 17 years, she goes off into a riff about bone marrow cancer, birth defects and a woman she met in Florida who suffered a devastating stroke when she was barely 30. Thanks to experimental treatment in the Dominican Republic, the woman made a full recovery, Heinz Kerry says.
”She still has a speech with a slight slur, a little bit,” she says, lisping a bit in illustration. ”But she is perfectly fine.”
Because she generally appears only before committed Democrats — and at predominantly female gatherings — such gaffes are generally forgiven.
And for all her much publicised resistance to being ”packaged” by Democratic handlers she is morphing into a political spouse. She moves easily from healthcare to her husband’s record and vision for the US. ”When it is his turn, he will present a face of America to the world as a face of America that is proud but is not arrogant, that is strong but not threatening, and that is the kind of America that wants to lead,” she says.
It sounds almost exactly like something John Kerry would have said. – Guardian Unlimited Â