Frankly, Kerry’s Wife Goes Off Script Again

As the nomination of Sen. John F. Kerry for president approaches, he has stuck firmly to his script, speaking of values, service and optimism as he hop-scotches across the country. His wife, true to form, has been less politic -- a tendency that dominated the buzz Monday at the Democratic National Convention after her dust-up with a journalist.

On Sunday, Teresa Heinz Kerry snapped at a writer from a Pittsburgh newspaper, telling him to “shove it” when he pressed her about a reference she made about the “un-American” quality of political discourse.

The exchange was caught on camera after a reception at the Massachusetts statehouse.

While convention participants and bloggers gossiped about it, some prominent Democrats defended Heinz Kerry.

“A lot of Americans are going to say, ‘Good for you; you go, girl,’ and that’s certainly how I feel about it,” New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told CNN.

But there’s no question that Heinz Kerry -- with her frank and often philosophical tone -- has brought a dose of irreverence to her husband’s carefully modulated campaign. Her unique brand of politicking will be on display tonight when she delivers a speech to convention delegates.

Although her remarks make some Kerry aides squirm, the candidate has expressed pride in his wife’s forthrightness. “I think my wife speaks her mind appropriately,” Kerry said Monday during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center.

His running mate, Sen. John Edwards, called her “warm” and “gracious.”

“Everybody gets a little frustrated with the media every once in a while,” he told a local television station in North Carolina. “But as a human being, I think we want her out there on the campaign.”

Her bluntness is just part of what makes Heinz Kerry an atypical political wife. A native of Mozambique, she speaks about growing up under a dictatorship. Although frequently at Kerry’s side, she often squirms as he embraces her in public. She frequently refers to her late husband, and says she has not known Kerry -- whom she married in 1995 -- for that long.

A philanthropist and mother of three, Heinz Kerry is also beloved by crowds, who whoop and cheer when she takes the stage.

“I have to say it’s time that women, like men, who know and have opinions be called smart and well-informed, and not opinionated,” she said at a fundraiser in Los Angeles last month.

But even when she praises Kerry, his wife sometimes undercuts her point -- and his.

“I don’t think, personally, anyone is ever qualified enough to be president of this country,” Heinz Kerry said Saturday at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, “but he’s pretty close to it.”

Her sharp words on Sunday came after she urged Pennsylvania delegates to restore political civility to politics. “We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics,” she said, according to Associated Press.

Afterward, Colin McNickle, an editorial writer with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a paper published by Richard Mellon Scaife that has a contentious history of covering her family, asked Heinz Kerry what she meant by “un-American activity.”

Minutes later, when he told her which news organization he was from, Heinz Kerry responded: “Understandable. You said something I didn’t say, now shove it.”

Republicans, who were forced to do damage control recently when Vice President Dick Cheney used an obscenity during a heated exchange with a Democratic senator, shied away from making an issue out of her remarks.

“Clearly Teresa Heinz Kerry is a very spirited campaigner, and we’ll leave it at that,” said Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Nick Gillespie, who blogs for libertarian magazine Reason, wrote, “Not quite as pithy” as Cheney “but not bad.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus, Eric Slater and Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.