Teresa Heinz Kerry gives me yet another reason to vote for Bush.

Heinz Kerry has made a feminist issue of her entitlement to express herself, and if she were a man, she says, no one would denigrate her as “opinionated.” She lectures knowledgeably on the inequities that confront women in the workplace and champions the excluded and discounted women of the Third World.

She pronounces folksy locutions with upper-class British vowels, sultry Portuguese s’s, and pizzicato t’s. Her repartee is quick, with a Gallic tartness. Backstage at a fund-raiser in New York, she bantered with her son Andre, who recently moved to Pittsburgh from Stockholm, in perfect French and the convincing Swedish of a Bergman spoof. The Hispanic press in South Florida was disappointed, last spring, that she declined to be interviewed in Spanish, which she speaks fluently, though with the occasional Italian verb. She explained that it would take three weeks to get her vocabulary up to speed for a serious policy discussion, but that she would be happy to oblige the reporters with a little “chitchat.”

She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband’s health-care proposals as “idiots,” and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word “scumbags” to describe some of her detractors.

In the early months of Kerry’s campaign, Heinz Kerry rarely gave a speech or an interview that wasn’t redolent with nostalgia for the sensations of her childhood (the steamy vibrance of New Orleans reminded her of home, she said, as did the palm trees and tile roofs of Florida and the earthiness of Pittsburgh), and she continues to invoke what she sees as Africa’s lessons about nature, race, freedom, dependence, and survival.

Heinz Kerry was in Fort Lauderdale to address a group of women supporters at a luxurious faux hacienda on the intercoastal waterway. It was a hot morning, and on the opposite bank workmen building a new mansion had taken their shirts off, and were gawking and gesturing, none too politely, at the ladies milling on the terrace and in the garden. Some members of the construction crew had evidently gone to the trouble of lowering a scaffold from which to spray a graffito, about ten feet high, in red paint, on the side of the bulkhead: “Liberals Ruin U.S.A.”

The guest of honor arrived late, as she tends to. Her staff tries to keep her to a tight schedule, but she says that she’s “too old to be bossed around.”

She says that she would like to be a model for older women who feel sexually disenfranchised, and to “liberate them from the feeling that they die as women” when their youth is gone.

At a rally one evening in Chicago’s Union Station, wearing a low-cut white blouse and a black suit, she projected—while Kerry spoke—the languor of a maja. On other occasions, she took slugs from a water bottle, frowned, slumped, scribbled a note, fiddled with her rings and hair, or whispered to someone on the dais.