Convention to hear from Kerry's outspoken wife Teresa

1.00pm

BOSTON - Teresa Heinz Kerry, in the glare of unintended attention after a heated exchange with a reporter, planned a personal but carefully scripted address on Tuesday US time to the Democratic National Convention on behalf of her husband.

The wife of Senator John Kerry is well known for an outspoken style but told CNN while her prime-time address on Tuesday night contains her own words, it uncharacteristically has been written in advance.

"I normally don't have text when I speak," the heir to the Heinz family food fortune said. "I speak from my heart, from my head and from my soul. That's where this came from. But it is written."

She has said she will speak for about 20 minutes, using a TelePrompTer for the first time. Like she does in dozens of campaign stops for her husband, she will allude to being raised under a repressive dictatorship in Mozambique and schooled in racially segregated South Africa.

Kerry watchers -- supporters and detractors alike -- are paying close attention since his wife angrily told a reporter to "shove it" just as the four-day convention was about to get under way in Boston.

Democrats rallied to her defence, noting her language paled in comparison to Vice President Dick Cheney's recent public use of profanity.

Her spokeswoman called it a moment of "extreme frustration," and Myra Gutin, author of The President's Partner: The First Lady in the 20th Century, concurred.

"My sense is she was pushed a little too far and shot back," said Gutin. "But if I were a media expert for the Kerry campaign, I would just caution her and say, 'Try to think as much as you can about what you say."'

A lot of people will be watching her for the first time, many who have yet to form an opinion.

A Washington Post ABC News survey taken last week showed her with a favourable rating of 27 per cent and an unfavourable rating of 26 per cent. A whopping 47 per cent had no opinion.

In previous speeches, Heinz Kerry has taken jabs at US President George W. Bush, pointedly noting that "at least" her husband reads and comparing the November 2 election to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

She also chafes at being packaged for public consumption. In an interview on Tuesday on National Public Radio, she said being scripted can be a political mistake.

"I think American people are smarter than that because the most valuable gift a politician has to give other than being thoughtful, of course, is his vulnerability," she said.

Heinz Kerry, 65, was married to Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Heinz for 25 years. After his death in a plane crash in 1991, she assumed oversight of the Heinz family philanthropic foundations.

She and Kerry have been married for nine years. They have five children, including Chris Heinz who also will speak on Tuesday on behalf of his stepfather.

Born in Mozambique, she was trained as a translator and speaks five languages -- English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French. If her husband is elected, she would be the second foreign-born US first lady, after Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, who was born in Britain.

- REUTERS