THK's speech

I thought I was bored, and that it was just me who found her a little aloof, distant and self-centered. Well, compared to The American Thinker, I am President of the THK fan club:

Acknowledging the applause, and maybe the signs, her first words were, “Thank-you. Thank-you. I love you, too.” Nothing about how honored she is to be addressing the convention and the nation. Just an acknowledgement of the assumed love for HER. Though the crowd had already stopped cheering and applauding, she gestured with her hands to quiet them, as if her body were programmed in advance to do so. The hands lingered a few moments too long, hanging there in front of her while the audience was silent.

[...]

To demonstrate the fact that she really does speak five languages, she hailed Spanish- and Latin-Americans in Spanish, Franco-Americans in French, Italian-Americans in Italian, and Portuguese- and Brazilian-Americans in Portuguese. A few words in each language, specifically using the hyphenated form in mentioning each group in its own native language. Because she was not speaking English, perhaps the hyphen overkill didn’t trouble as many people as it should have. Such linguistic showboating bothers me when people order their meal in French, sometimes to a waiter who doesn't have any idea what they want to eat.

She then returned to her oddly slow, slightly off-rhythm English, adding to the list of groups she was addressing immigrants in general (so Chinese, Vietnamese, and other immigrant speakers of the really hard languages not derived from Latin roots would not be offended, I suppose).

[...]

But it was really all about her. This is clearly a woman who thinks and feels that she is the one paying the bills, so she gets to call the shots. I can imagine that Sen. Kerry has had to put up with a lot of this, but has made his peace with it, considering the financial benefits.
None of the details of her marriage would be of the slightest interest to me or anyone else, if it weren't for the fact that her husband could well be the next President. A man bought and paid for, with a willful, short-tempered, somewhat angry and defensive, egotistical spouse, one who is used to getting hr own way whenever she demands it.
But I, for one, no matter how tedious and icky it felt listening to her, am grateful that she has taken her place on the national stage. We deserve to know more about her, considering how important her role is in her husband's life. She is, in fact, his primary source of his livelihood. Just as we would demand to know about a candidate's job, we deserve to know about Teresa, who pays far more lavishly than any other job Kerry could hold.

On one hand, it seems a little far to pry into her motives and finances, but The Thinker makes a good point:

Conventional wisdom holds that nobody votes for a First Lady, that candidates’ wives may be interesting, but are unimportant in voting. I am not so sure this time around. John Kerry’s choices for spouse share one thing in common: vast wealth. That kind of money affects the behavior of those around it, the same way that black holes bend the waves of light and gravity. The candidate himself has been living in this bizarre environment of marriage to great wealth for decades. The strange, somewhat disturbing woman, who bears all the marks of the one in charge, may well be even more influential than Hillary Rodham Clinton, given an opportunity to live in the White House.

Posted by jk at July 28, 2004 01:20 PM