I could care less how much money Heinz-Kerry (or Laura Bush) might have, unless they’re trying to buy the election. (No evidence of that.) I could care less how they pronounce their names, how they dress, how they wear their hair or who makes a better chocolate chip cookie. I don’t care if a First Lady or potential First Lady sits with her legs wide open while wearing a skirt, chews tobacco or invites the Chippendale dancers over to entertain her and thirty of her best galpals.
I also didn’t where Heinz-Kerry was from until she tried to use it for her own advantage. Theresa repeatedly refers to herself as “African-American” when speaking to mainly black audiences. This is nothing but a blatantly pandering attempt to evoke a connection which cannot possibly exist between black-skinned Americans and a privileged, white-skinned European whose birth in Mozambique did not shape enough of an afrocentric identity in her youth (when she lived surrounded by black people) to stop her from moving to South Africa, living there as a privileged white and receiving her education from an all-white university during Apartheid. She personally benefitted from one of the most brutal and insidious forms of racial oppression in the modern era, but now she wants to be buddy-buddy with us, and claim that she’s one of us. No, Theresa, I don’t think so.
Is she a strong woman? Sure, she’s strong. But strength doesn’t have to mean stridence, rudeness, brashness nor arrogance – the women on Capitol Hill, Governors Granholm, Lingle, Sibelius or Walker, Condoleeza Rice, Meg Whitman (eBay), Judith Regan (ReganBooks) and Carly Fiorina (Hewlett-Packard) are all excellent examples of that truth. But stridence, rudeness, brashness and arrogance are exactly the traits which garner so much criticism for Heinz-Kerry. She’s supposed to be helping her husband in what is essentially a protracted, national job interview, actiing as his representative. But by all appearances, she evinces a distinct lack of willingness to think before she speaks, to consider compromise, consider ramifications, to be diplomatic, to temper herself or her language or to accept that it is entirely possible for her intellectual and social equals to hold differing viewpoints. And all the while, her husband continually supports her, defends her, and has made no effort to keep her off of the front lines, away from reporters or to limit her to written (and carefully vetted) commentary only, without pausing to notice that her continual ad hominems don’t reflect well on him and his campaign.
This woman has described America as hell, called those who disagree with her husband’s health plan idiots and casually tossed off a barbed inanity indicating that her husband’s campaign could give a damn about an entire state. (And that she has no understanding of the electoral college process.) She’s called her detractors “scumbags.” She’s stated, publicly, that stepchildren should be treated like pets.
These things are offensive.
They’re offensive whether they come from a liberal or a conservative, a man or a woman. And more importantly, they illustrate an important reality in the commerce of ideas: when you have to resort to namecalling and pejoratives and outrageousness to get your message across, that indicates a problem with either the points themselves or the person holding them. Theresa, her words and her actions have all been judged, and found lacking.
