The lady who should be in the White House

In light of the shocking news that President Bush personally wanted all U.S. Attorneys fired for not playing ball on "voter fraud" cases (otherwise known as voter suppression or How They Stole the 2004 Election and Tried to Steal the 2006 Election), I am hit once again with the stunning presidential electoral loss we endured in 2004.  Doubling the pain is the reality that Teresa Heinz Kerry is not our First Lady.  For she is a rare commodity in today's politics -- honest, down to earth, and always lending a hand to make this world a better place.  Now that she and John Kerry are coming out with a new book entitled This Moment on Earth about environmental activists across the country, I thought this was as good a time as any to celebrate this great American and honor her for all of her good works and for the person that she is.
Let's face it -- Teresa got an unbelievably bad rap in 2004.  Her biggest sin?  Not fitting in with the usual frightfully ever smiling automaton we have come to know in Laura Bush (or not know since she never reveals one real thing about herself).  As the president's approval ratings have plummeted, Mrs. Bush has proven herself to be perfectly capable of idiotic comments that expose her of being no better than her husband.  She shows no leadership qualities whatsoever and is usually out of sight unless she's called in to bail out Bush by telling off color jokes that I need to shield my children from.  So who's the embarassment now?

Teresa, on the other hand, seems to grow in classiness, leadership, and accomplishment, the more you get to know her.  She already runs one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the country, Heinz Family Philanthropies, and that's just the beginning of all the amazing things she has done over the years.  A quick peruse into her many endeavors offers a staggering array of good works and gives us a glimpse at what one woman can do for the vital issues of our time like the environment, where other people of considerable wealth like her, pale in comparison:

Environmental Programs and Advocacy

Teresa Heinz has contributed to the environmental movement through many programs and outreach efforts, including but not limited to:

* In 1990, she co-founded the Alliance To End Childhood Lead Poisoning (which later was renamed the Alliance for Healthy Homes), through the first environmental grant of the Vira I. Heinz Endowment. The current website of the Alliance for Healthy Homes lists her as an "honorary board member" and praises her as "One of the foremost advocates on children's health and environmental issues."

* In 1992, she attended the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, as a presidentially-appointed member of a delegation representing non-governmental organizations at the Summit.

* In 1993, she co-founded, with her future husband Senator John Kerry, and environmentalist academic Dr. Anthony D. Cortese, the organization Second Nature, which brings "Education for Sustainability" to college campuses.

* In 1993 she founded the Heinz Awards, including a category for outstanding contributions to the environment.

* In 1995, through a $20 million grant from the Heinz Endowments, provided initial funding for The Heinz Center, "a nonprofit institution dedicated to improving the scientific and economic foundation for environmental policy through multisectoral collaboration among industry, government, academia, and environmental organizations."

* Since 1996, Heinz has hosted an annual "Women's Health and the Environment" conference series.

* Founded the Teresa Heinz Scholars for Environmental Research program, which annually awards eight $10,000 awards for doctoral dissertation support and eight $5,000 awards for master's thesis support, for research having "public policy relevance that increases society's understanding of environmental concerns and proposed solutions."

* Heinz is currently a board member of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Women's Economic Security Programs and Advocacy

* In 1995, the book Pensions in Crisis: Why the system is failing America and how you can protect your future (later republished as The Pension Book) was published, with support from the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Foundation, and a foreword by Teresa Heinz.

* Spurred by the issues uncovered by Pensions in Crisis, Teresa Heinz and her foundation created the Women's Retirement Initiative, to "extend that investigation and examine how the dynamics of our pension and retirement system contribute to the disproportionate rate of poverty among older women."

* In 1996, the Heinz Foundations created WISER, the Women's Institute for a Secure RetirementWomen's Institute for a Secure Retirement.

Incidentally, for any Kossaks in the Pittsburgh area, that annual Women's Health and the Environment Conference is coming up on April 20th, and you can go to their website for more info, including the fact that the Indigo Girls are going to be there!  Teresa has also started a Women's Health and Environment newsletter which you can read here.  In brief, Teresa's article is about the chemicals that are in our body, how it affects our health, and a call to action on what to do about it.

Teresa was also involved with the Greening of Pittsburgh starting in 1991, a movement that has spread across the country and the world, to make buildings more natural using the Hannover Principles from the 2000 World's Fair.  Teresa explains here:

The simple genius behind the nine Hannover Principles was that they reframed the issue. Rather than take a certain amount of ecological harm as a given, with people on various sides of the environmental debate reduced to arguing over the permissible amount, [Architect and Designer] Bill and Michael invited us to consider an alternative. Why not just design products and institutions that support the environment, they asked?

The key insight of eco-effective or cradle-to-cradle thinking is recognizing the materials of our daily lives-even highly technical, synthetic industrial materials-as nutrients that can be designed to circulate in human systems very much like nitrogen, water, and simple sugars circulate in nature's nutrient cycles. Rather than using materials once and sending them to the landfill-our current cradle-to-grave system-cradle-to-cradle materials are designed to be returned safely to the soil or to flow back to industry to be used again and again.

...

My own hopes for the urban landscapes of Pittsburgh brought the Hannover Principles home, literally. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where the Principles were introduced to the international community, I invited Bill and Michael to come to Pittsburgh to share their ideas. Both were invited to lecture at Carnegie Mellon University and, as I had hoped, the Hannover Principles became a part of the dialogue going on in Pittsburgh at the time about the region's environmental future.

Today, Pittsburgh is gaining national recognition as a leader in green building and sustainable design. In many ways, that began with the building of the Heinz family offices, which represented the first, commercial-scale use of sustainably harvested tropical wood. Our offices served as a laboratory and model for others to learn from, and not just locally. The Discovery Channel covered it; architectural magazines wrote about it; and builders, designers and architects from across the country came to study its features. Since then, the ideas articulated in the Hannover Principles have never been far from the minds of the staff at The Heinz Endowments as they have advanced our green building agenda in Pittsburgh over the past decade.

Those ideas are making communities from Pittsburgh to Chicago and from Shanghai to Barcelona better places to live. They are helping people create buildings and landscapes where natural processes unfold with renewed vitality.

I have to say this is just fascinating, and kudos to Teresa for having the foresight to think of having the Heinz Foundation offices built this way and create a trend the whole world is following.

The big project that Teresa has now just completed was co-writing a book with her husband, John Kerry, called This Moment on Earth: Today's New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future.  There is no doubt that traveling across the country during the 2004 campaign had a profound impact on the Kerrys and this book was born out of that experience.  A recent article in the Boston Globe explains:

In 2004, during his run for president, Senator John F. Kerry was touting wind power in Minnesota, endorsing clean-coal technology in West Virginia, and talking about preserving fisheries in Washington state. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, kept her own busy travel schedule, warning about carcinogenic toxins and the importance of cancer screening.

They had hoped such issues would help vault them to the White House. Now, they hope to show people that it doesn't take the power of a president -- or even a veteran United States senator -- to help save the environment.

...

Heinz Kerry, who has shied away from discussing the 2004 campaign in detail, said in an interview she resisted the idea of writing a book with her husband because she felt "lazy" and emotionally and physically drained after the grueling 2004 campaign.

A former Republican senator's wife who was born in Africa and educated overseas, Heinz Kerry said she felt wronged by GOP "wise guys" who lampooned her international background.

But with time and distance from the campaign, she said, she came to realize that her husband's unsuccessful presidential campaign created a powerful pulpit the couple can use to speak their minds on crucial issues.

You can read excerpts of This Moment on Earth here, as well as notes from the authors and a very nice review of the book by Al Gore (I have noticed the last two nominees playing tag team, plugging each other's work, and I just think that's great).

As much as I admire the good works of Teresa, it has been her candor that has me most enamored with her.  As the Right and the MSM incessantly attacked her for being open and honest during the 2004 campaign, I found these qualities in her reassuring -- for had she been First Lady, we would have had someone there who would have in no uncertain terms kept things real in a world too often dominated by spin.  She also had a gift of saying things that really got at the truth, no matter how impolitic the punditocracy found it.  No one has better predicted what the second Bush term would be like than Teresa Heinz Kerry:

Heinz Kerry was introducing her husband, John F. Kerry, at a huge outdoor rally here when a group of Bush supporters, armed with a megaphone, started chanting from a distance, "Four more years! Four more years!"

Without hesitating, Heinz Kerry responded, "They want four more years of hell."

Anyone care to contradict the prophet THK?

Most recently, Teresa most poignantly defended her husband at an event with Charlie Rose (which was supposed to focus on the environment), who inexplicably quoted excerpts from the book "The Way to Win" by quintessential MSM snark artists Mark Halperin and John Harris (Media Matter's scathing review can be summed up as follows:  "If a Democrat wants to win in '08, he or she should not act like a Democrat".  Whatever lessons we take away from 2004, that thesis is not one of them).  I love Teresa's response:

Later, Mr. Rose read a scathing excerpt from a recent book-The Way to Win, by Mark Halperin and John Harris-that called Mr. Kerry "a case study" in how not to run for President.

(Ms. Heinz's response: "If all John Kerry is is a case study, I'm sorry for America.")

Just like that, she turned all of the cynicism and ugliness in politics on its head, and humanized it, made it real.  I yearn for that in our leaders, and am truly sorry for America, too, that Teresa Heinz Kerry is not our First Lady.

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