Heinz Kerry apologizes for comment about first lady

Heinz Kerry tried to contact Laura Bush personally.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Teresa Heinz Kerry's unguarded speaking style created a campaign sideshow Wednesday with a comment questioning whether first lady Laura Bush had held "a real job."
Heinz Kerry apologized later in the day, saying she "had forgotten" Bush's 10 years working as a teacher and librarian.
The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry made the offhand remark in an interview with USA Today published Wednesday. She was asked to explain differences between herself and Bush.
"Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good," Heinz Kerry said. "But I don't know that she's ever had a real job -- I mean, since she's been grown-up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things."
The Bush campaign criticized Heinz Kerry for appearing to draw a distinction between women who work in the home and those who work outside the home.
Response
"Well, I think it's very nice that she apologized, but in some ways the apology almost made the comment worse, because she seems to have forgotten that being a mother is a real job," said Karen Hughes, an adviser to President Bush, on CNN's "Inside Politics."
Hughes said Heinz Kerry's comments reflected an "unfortunate mind-set that seeks to divide women based on whether you work at home or whether you work outside the home. I've done both, and so has Laura Bush. And both are difficult, and both are rewarding."
After her comment made the rounds on cable TV programs, Heinz Kerry called the first lady to apologize personally.
Heinz Kerry did not reach her but spoke to her chief of staff, said Sarah Gegenheimer, a spokeswoman for Heinz Kerry. "I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a schoolteacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children," Heinz Kerry said in a statement.
"I appreciate and honor Mrs. Bush's service to the country as a first lady, and am sincerely sorry I had not remembered her important work in the past."
Bush appreciated the phone call and empathized with Heinz Kerry over the public scrutiny to which candidates' wives are subjected, said Gordon Johndroe, the first lady's spokesman.
"Mrs. Bush is proud of her time as a public schoolteacher and librarian, raising a family and serving as first lady, but she also knows that some days can be longer than others out on the campaign trail when your husband is running for president," Johndroe said. Both women had jobs in the work force before marrying politicians and raising children.
Laura Bush worked as a schoolteacher and librarian in public schools in Texas from 1968 to 1977, when she married George W. Bush. She became an advocate of literacy and organized book festivals in Texas and Washington.
Heinz Kerry worked as an interpreter for the United Nations in the 1960s and married John Heinz, heir to the Heinz family fortune and a future senator from Pennsylvania, in 1966. After he died in 1991, she became chairwoman of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. She married Kerry in 1995.
Although philanthropic work consumes much of her time now, Heinz Kerry has said that as a young woman she never intended to have a full-time job.
"I had no ambition," she said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last fall. "I thought of myself as being married and having children, which is what all the ladies did."At a rally Wednesday night at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, neither she nor Kerry mentioned the remarks about the first lady.
"What I love about her is what America has come to love about her -- this is a woman who tells what's on her mind and tells the truth to the American people," the Democratic candidate said.