HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Teresa Heinz Kerry was talking, and so the entire room at the St. Moritz restaurant was dead silent, the back rows leaning forward as if the floor itself were tilted.
This held for nearly an hour, the whole time Heinz Kerry spoke. Her voice was so soft that pity the person who coughed. People would turn to the offending noisemaker with faces that said "shush -- or leave."
Heinz Kerry was not here to give a snappy comeback to the Republicans or the press or the radio talk show hosts who have used a few choice unscripted remarks of hers to cast the wife of the Democratic presidential nominee as a loose cannon, even a crazy woman. She was talking, as she has more than a dozen times in more than a dozen cities over the past few weeks, about health care.
She was thorough, wonkish. She talked about universal health care for children, "wellness" programs, affordable prescription drug plans and other ideas she said her husband, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), would carry out as president. When she finished, pushing her auburn waves from her face to flash a smile, the 80 people who sat so still for her stood and applauded.
The event received little notice. But a comment Heinz Kerry made later that afternoon to a Lancaster newspaper sure did. "Only an idiot wouldn't like this," she told the newspaper, speaking of Kerry's health care plan. "Of course, there are idiots."
So goes the dilemma of Teresa Heinz Kerry these days, not to mention a nervous Kerry campaign. Harrisburg was no fluke. The scenario repeats itself on nearly all the solo campaign trips Heinz Kerry makes these days, usually with friendly audiences in Rust Belt swing states such as her adopted, beloved home of Pennsylvania. Heinz Kerry conducts health care seminars of a sort, with other panelists, that are often 90 minutes to two hours long, including question-and-answer sessions. Afterward, the crowd is always hers. Most anyone you ask in attendance -- Democrat, independent or Republican -- will use words such as "impressed" and "charmed" in their reviews.
But then there are those "only an idiot," "shove it" moments.
Much of the public that knows of Heinz Kerry -- and polls suggest that at least a third of the public still does not know much about her at all -- knows of her from looping cable news sound bites. That public knows a woman who told a columnist before the Democratic National Convention to "shove it." (Though many people may still not know that the columnist writes for a Pittsburgh newspaper owned by conservative Richard Mellon Scaife, who not only spent millions of dollars trying to discredit the Clintons but also spent years attacking Heinz Kerry's late, first husband, Sen. John Heinz (Pa.) -- a Republican -- whom Scaife found too liberal.)
The public that knows "shove it" probably also knows what Heinz Kerry uttered a few days later, at a campaign rally with her husband. When hecklers started chanting "Four more years!" she said: "They want four more years of hell!" The Kerry crowd loved it. But the line was a new reason to say Heinz Kerry was distracting attention from the candidate. It also gave Republicans the ammunition to contrast the image of a tempestuous Kerry wife with that of first lady Laura Bush, the all-American Betty to Heinz Kerry's rich, exotic Veronica. President Bush not so subtly alluded to the contrast in his first campaign swing after the Democratic convention, when he told a crowd that the best reason to vote for him was to have Laura Bush as first lady again.
Since then, Laura Bush, who has lacked a political profile of her own these past four years, has been all over the news -- and all over the campaign trail. Her speech at the Republican National Convention received glowing reviews. She has made controversial remarks, such as saying that her husband supports stem cell science -- much to stem cell scientists' surprise -- and that the Swift boat veterans' ads attacking Kerry's service in Vietnam were "fair," although Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), now stumping for Bush, has called them shameful. But Laura Bush's remarks have barely raised an eyebrow.
Meanwhile, Heinz Kerry, 65, who heads one of the largest philanthropies in the country (and who won the 2003 Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal for Humanitarianism for her work on behalf of the environment, education, women and children, and, yes, health care) has kept a schedule of mostly small events.
Her first solo campaign swing after the Democratic convention, in Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia and Pennsylvania over four days, focused largely on events with mostly Democratic audiences, like the one in Harrisburg. In her second swing, over the past week, she has alternated between the small health care talks and rallies with local Democratic leaders.
In Pennsylvania, she has had especially welcoming audiences. In York on Wednesday, where she rallied Democratic elected officials, party leaders and candidates, several in the audience said they knew her because of the Heinz Foundation, and they would then begin citing some of the projects that the organization has supported, funded or created.
The Kerry campaign insists that it is not tamping down her profile, keeping her among the faithful, or trying to censor an uncensorable woman with a mind of her own. It blames schedule demands for preventing her from answering reporters' questions after events or from granting interviews during her swings. The campaign refused repeated requests for interviews for this story, pleading jampacked days.
