  Sunday Herald Ros Davidson One is mouthy and colourful, a multilingual Mozambique-born ketchup billionaire. The other is serene, openly adoring of her husband – and, it has to be said, something of a nonentity. The 2004 presidential race is also a battle of two spouses : Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of the Democratic contender, and Laura Bush, the First Lady. Although the conventional wisdom is that Americans do not vote on the basis of a candidate’s spouse, this year could be different. Between 55% and 65% of undecided voters are female – and Heinz Kerry could be just the woman to energise them, according to Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior political scholar at the University of Southern California and a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times.
“The whole campaign is about undecided voters in the battleground states,” she says. The race is so tight that each campaign team is looking for anything that gives their candidate an edge – and the wives could yet be the key. To supporters of George W Bush, Heinz Kerry is another Hillary Clinton, polarising and distracting. For those backing John Kerry, she has everything Laura Bush does not: opinions, soul and independence. The opening line from her much-anticipated speech to the Democratic Convention in Boston last month has already become famous.
“My name is Teresa Heinz Kerry. And by now I hope it will come as no surprise to anyone that I have something to say,” she announced as the delegates roared. Indeed, the 65-year-old is famous for saying what she thinks, when she thinks it – such as telling a journalist from a right-wing newspaper to “shove it!” on the eve of the Democratic Convention, or claiming that re-electing George Bush will mean “four more years of hell”. She has also fielded questions on foreign policy on CNN’s Larry King Live, and talked about how she marched against apartheid while she was a student in Johannesburg. Often she is the first to walk to the back of the Kerry-Edwards campaign plane to jaw with the press: in typical Teresa style, she may be wearing shades and carrying a glass of wine. And once she told a TV interviewer, with a mischievous smile, that she’s sexy, that she uses Botox and that she made her husband sign a prenuptial agreement. (She inherited her fortune from her first husband, the Republican senator John Heinz, who was killed in a plane crash in 1991. ) But she can also be insensitive. “You can talk to the simplest people about any issue,” she once told a crowd in Boston.
On another occasion she told 3200 Democratic women: “Women for Kerry need birth control, you’ve gotten so huge!” At a recent campaign stop in Wisconsin, she even seemed to overshadow her husband. At a brewery, John Kerry walked up to a female employee for a handshake. But she looked right past him and asked: “Where’s Teresa?” According to one insider, the Kerry campaign team made a decision early on to “let Teresa be Teresa”. In the last few days, however, she has slipped slightly from view, amid rumours that she and her husband have been arguing so much they have slept in different hotel rooms. Despite this, Celinda Lake, one of the Democrats’ senior political strategists, is confident that Heinz Kerry will increase the turnout of single women, which should give her husband a major boost. More women vote Democrat than do men, and polls have suggested that single females respond favourably to outspoken women such as Heinz Kerry. In the last presidential election, more than 21 million single women – nearly 50% of those eligible – did not bother to vote. Laura Bush, on the other hand, couldn’t be much more different. Her recent campaign work in key battleground states was dubbed the “I’m not Teresa” tour by the press: several days of scripted sweetness and devotion.
The closest she has come to controversy is talking about stem-cell research, but even then she merely hinted that there were two sides to the issue, staying above the political fray. She has also been careful to visit female-owned businesses and remind potential supporters that her husband has two senior female advisers, Condoleezza Rice and Margaret Spellings, who deal with national security and domestic policy respectively.
“ That means that in the White House women are in charge of everything abroad and everything at home, which sounds about right to me,” she has said . Yet Bush’s focus has almost always been on her husband, in stark contrast to Heinz Kerry, who prefers talking about ideas. Bush has started almost every recent speech with a version of “I’m here to talk about George Bush” or “I’m proud of my husband”.
A new television advert for the Republicans sums up her role: she listens as her husband talks emotionally about the September 11 victims. She exudes love for George, but is grave, wholesome and silent. Perhaps because of this, she has become one of the Bush campaign’s strongest assets. Yet she has also started to show a more light-hearted side, joking with chat-show host Jay Leno about gambling and her formidable mother-in-law Barbara. And she has become a key fundraiser: her take this year is $10 million. Her low-key approach also means she gives her critics little ammunition.
In one recent poll by ABC News and the Washington Post, Bush had an “unfavourable rating” of 12% – less than half Heinz Kerry’s 26%. The best most of her detractors can do is point out that, as a former librarian and school teacher, she shelves her books at home by the Dewey decimal system. However, a new anti-Bush play by the celebrated writer Tony Kushner does depict her reading to dead Iraqi children. Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, downplays the importance of the two women . “Each campaign is trying to spin this First Lady thing to their advantage,” he says dismissively. But that, of course, is the point: when an election promises to be this close, you need every advantage you can get. 
