Kerry's wife made him sign a Pre-Nup. If she doesn't trust him with her money how can we trust him with ours???

Does Teresa Heinz Trust John Kerry? If not, why should we? By Timothy Noah Posted Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2003, at 5:12 PM PT

If Teresa Heinz won't trust presidential candidate John Kerry with her money, why should American voters trust Kerry with their country?

Teresa Heinz and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., were married in 1995. Kerry's assets at the time were a few million dollars. (Click here for Kerry's Senate financial disclosure form for 1995.) Heinz's assets at the time were reportedly around half a billion dollars, which she'd inherited from her late husband, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., heir to the ketchup fortune. Unlike many other married couples, Heinz and Kerry kept their premarital assets separate. Much of Teresa Heinz's inheritance was no doubt tied up in trusts, but a substantial sum must have been unencumbered, because she had Sen. Kerry sign a prenuptial agreement. "Everybody has a prenup," Heinz explained to Lisa DiPaulo, who profiled her sympathetically in Elle.

You have to have a prenup. You've got three kids with somebody else, you've got to have a prenup. You could be as generous or as sensitive as you want. But you have to have a prenup.

By all accounts, Teresa Heinz had no interest in becoming first lady during her 25-year marriage to John Heinz (who died in a 1991 plane crash). "Over my dead body," she told John. Apparently she spent the first seven years of her marriage to John Kerry telling him the same thing. According to a Nov. 30 profile by Maeve Reston in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "It was only last year that she says she changed her mind and told Kerry she would support his decision to run."

This narrative acquired more than sentimental interest a couple of weeks ago after Kerry decided to follow Howard Dean's lead and opt out of public financing for the Democratic primaries. Because Kerry has lost his early fundraising lead to Dean, he will have to dig into his own personal funds to finance his campaign. This will likely include borrowing against his assets and those he shares with his wife, who now goes by the name "Teresa Heinz Kerry," which include their $10 million house on Boston's fancy Louisberg Square. In addition, Heinz Kerry told Benjamin Weiser and Todd S. Purdum of the New York Times that she'd consider making independent expenditures on his behalf if she felt his opponents were attacking him unfairly. "I think that is a First Amendment right in America for me," she told them. "I have that right. But that's a serious thing to do. It has to be really legitimate."

An independent expenditure campaign, though, would almost certainly violate federal campaign law. "Under the Federal Election Commission's rules, you cannot have access to the candidate's strategies and plans," Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and chairman of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, explained to Chatterbox. The FEC defines "independent expenditure" as

an expenditure by a person for communication expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate that is not made in cooperation, consultation, or concert with, or at the request or suggestion of, a candidate, a candidate's authorized committee, or their agents, or a political party committee or its agents.

In Heinz Kerry's case, such an expenditure would be impossible to square with Glen Johnson's observation in the Nov. 21 Boston Globe that Heinz Kerry "displayed an intimate knowledge not only of the inner workings of her husband's campaign, but of the overall 2004 race."

What if Heinz Kerry tore up her prenup and put Kerry's name on all deeds, titles, and bank accounts permitted by the terms of her inheritance? Wouldn't her money then be community property, and therefore Kerry's own personal funds as well? "It's too late," Potter told Chatterbox. The FEC defines "personal funds" as

(1) Any assets which, under applicable state law, at the time he or she became a candidate [italics Chatterbox's], the candidate had legal right of access to or control over, and with respect to which the candidate had either:

(i) Legal and rightful title, or

(ii) An equitable interest.

(2) Salary and other earned income from bona fide employment; dividends and proceeds from the sale of the candidate's stocks or other investments; bequests to the candidate; income from trusts established before candidacy; income from trusts established by bequest after candidacy of which the candidate is the beneficiary; gifts of a personal nature which had been customarily received prior to candidacy [italics Chatterbox's]; proceeds from lotteries and similar legal games of chance.

The only way Heinz Kerry could now give substantial money to Kerry's campaign would be to tear up her prenup and kill herself.

This leads us to the inevitable question of whether these circumstances could have been foreseen by Teresa Heinz Kerry—if not when she married John Kerry, then anytime prior to his entry into the 2004 presidential race. Back then, she could have transferred assets for him to tap in his campaign. At the very least, she could have established a pattern of making substantial monetary "gifts of a personal nature" so that she could legally continue this practice after he became a candidate. But she didn't. Even the prenup seems less than entirely necessary when you consider Heinz Kerry's age—she's 65—and the near-certainty that her children's future prosperity is well protected by trust funds set up long before John Heinz's death. While it's probably true that most very rich people prefer to draw up prenups before they marry, not all of them do. Paul McCartney, for instance, reportedly declined his second wife Heather Mills' offer to sign one.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has often been portrayed in the press as a ditz, but in fact she is an extremely bright and accomplished woman. (Has any other candidate's wife been asked to testify before Congress on pension policy?) It simply can't have escaped her notice, when she married John Kerry, that he was going to run for president someday. It was obvious to Morley Safer thirty-two years ago, when he interviewed Kerry, then a prominent activist against the Vietnam war—in which Kerry had served—for 60 Minutes. ("Do you want to be president of the United States?" Safer asked. "No," Kerry replied. "That's such a crazy question when there are so many things to be done and I don't know whether I could do them.") To be sure, Kerry had every expectation, heading into the 2004 race, that he was going to lead the pack in fund raising, which he did for awhile. But Heinz Kerry has been around politics long enough to know that a presidential candidate can't count on anything. And she had the example of George W. Bush's nomination race in 2000 before her to show that presidential candidates don't always stay within the limits imposed by public financing.

Heinz Kerry must have had some inkling that the day might come when her second husband would need her money. And knowing that, she didn't make it available. That doesn't make her a bad wife. But it does raise a disconcerting question for voters. If Teresa Heinz Kerry won't give John Kerry the keys to the car, why should we?

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

This is so blatantly stupid that it doesn't really deserve a repy. However, I don't want Elvis thinking his lunacy is all for not.

So evidently anyone that has a pre-nup in their marriage cannot be trusted. I hope the credit industry doesn't adopt this philosophy; that could easily spell the demise of our economy, considering the number of pre-nups in today's marriages.

Anyway, here's a tit-for-tat. Bush has a history of business failures. If he can't run a business, why should we trust him to run the country? Consider the following:

"George W. Bush started out researching who owned mineral rights, and later started his own oil and gas company by 1978, taking $17,000 from his education trust fund to set up Arbusto Energy (arbusto means Bush in Spanish). The company nearly failed when oil prices fell. He tried to save the business, first by making the brilliant managerial move of changing the company's name and later by merging with other companies.

In 1983, the company was rescued from failure when Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, bought it. Bush became chief executive officer. Some people are impressed with a failed CEO!

Harken Energy Corporation acquired Spectrum 7 in 1986, after Spectrum had lost $400,000. Notice how George continued with Spectrum in much the same manner as he did with his company, by failing! In the buyout deal, Bush and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Bush became a director and was hired as a "consultant" to Harken. He received another $600,000 of Harken stock, and has been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year. Notice also how the welfare of the rich has colorful terms like "consultant," and "director."

By the spring of 1987, Harken was in need of cash. More failure! What a consistent failure of an SOB our president is. So Bush and his fellow Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens contributed $100,000 to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.) Stephens arranged for Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Bush’s company in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken's board as a major investor. Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each had ties to the infamous, scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In 1990, Bush sold his remaining stock options and left the oil business. Writer Jack Colhoun revealed some details of that stock sale, referring to Bush by his childhood nickname “Junior”:

On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560-a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf.

"There is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold the $848,560 of Harken stock," asserted U.S. News & World Report. The magazine noted Harken appointed Junior to a 'fairness committee' to study possible economic restructuring of the company. Junior worked closely with financial advisers from Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company, who concluded "only drastic action could save Harken." Yet, this failure skated because his President father had appointed the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission."

And it runs in the family. Do a search on Neil Bush. Talk about a miserable failure.

Yeah, both articles are pretty stupid. Naturally I found the Bush one on an obviously anti-Bush site just to mimic the anti-Kerry slant on Elvis'.

It's so easy to find extreme points of view to support a cause. However, the anti-Bushies have a definate advantage because the administration has been mucking things up for three years giving a lot of ammunition to write about.

If it wasn't such a waste of time and bandwidth I'd post two anti-Bush articles to every stupid anti-Kerry article. Plus the cut and paste thing doesn't leave much room for original thought, now does it.

I also noted how Kerry acted like a real Democrat man today Much in the mold of Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. When asked about the Chev suburban he and his wife have been seen using ,Kerry the gentleman ,said his wife bought it not himself. His position on fuel efficient vehicles at stake. A real man blaming it on his wife Much like Slick Willy taking advantage of an intern and letting the press have a feild day with a young woman and of course ol T kennedy running like a coward and leaving poor Mary Jo to drown .

Ted Kennedy is in good company with Laura Bush:

http://www.nctimes.net/news/050400/ss.html

(it's just the first of many hit's on the subject not particularly the best one)

You're right...my post was very lame.

stlhead I am now totally convinced that you must be a mentally disturbed lunatic with deep seated emotional problems that need immediate professional attention. Get a life if you can....or commit yourself to a mental institution for the sake of all humanity.

No offense taken aunty. Some things never die.

grandpa...I really couldn't care less what your opinion is of me but I have yet to call you names even though I disagree with almost everything you write politically. The Muslim thread blows me away though. It really lowered my opinion of you.

Never know what is real and what is not....do you now stlhead??

My wife drives an SUV.........you know why? Because she WANTED one.


That Kerry has a lot of nerve letting his wife drive what she wants to. :rolleyes:

Stlhd,

I love the irony of your post. I comment on how the libs like to take advantage of women and you take a shot at Laura Bush. FYI she is not running for office or caliming one thing and doing another. The basset hound is.

Dan S. If you were runing for president it would be an issue. Try, do as I say but not as I do, parenting with your kids and see how they turn out.

Bush drives a big old 4x4 monster truck

Kerry drives a Chrysler made in Canada

I'll keep that in mind when I run myself........

What do you tell a kid who wants a beer when you're having one?

theking, like I said some things never die. Why is what Ted kennedy did as a kid have anything to do with todays world? In response I simply brought up Neil, who actually screwed up big time several times during his adult life and Laura who also made a mistake when she was a kid. I hold none of this against them, well, except Neil with the S&L scandal. You wonder how many skeletons are really in the closets of these very rich very powerful families but were successfully covered up?

Dan S,

I don't drink so it's not a problem:-)

Oh............ now I see your problem.