Kerry and Bush in connubial coffins
It was Harvard (Al Gore) against Yale (George W Bush) last time, and now it's an all-Yale event between Bush and Kerry. At least those other Yale alumni, Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean, are out of the incestuous race. This year's election is even worse than the last all-Yale line-up of Bush the elder and Bill Clinton, since Clinton (like Hillary) was only at Yale Law School. The real fun this time is that both Kerry and Bush were members of the super-secret Skull and Bones society, whose members meet in a miniature Greek temple called the Tombs, drink from skull-shaped glasses and hold formal discussions in a tiny room called the Inner Temple, or Room 322. All members are given nicknames: Kerry was "Long Devil" and Bush was "Temporary" (he didn't pick a name at first and the sobriquet stuck). Bush the elder had the name - and the 800 living fellow Bonesmen still call him this - "Magog," the title always reserved for the most sexually experienced new member. "Gog," meanwhile, is reserved for the new Bonesman with the least sexual background. How is this information gleaned? Well, one of the initiation rites is to clamber inside an open coffin and confess all one's "CB" - connubial bliss - experiences to the fellows (and now to the female members, who were first allowed in 1992). Thanks to generous former members, the Skull and Bones owns its own summer resort: the whole of Deer Island in New York's Alexandria Bay, where old Bonesmen are required to gather each year. This summer's event should be fun, when Long Devil starts leaning too heavily on the word "Temporary" when addressing the son of Magog.
Is Kerry's wife African American?
It is not widely known that Long Devil's wife likes to call herself an "African-American," though she stresses that she doesn't use the hyphen. Born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, the daughter of a Portugese doctor working in Mozambique, Teresa Heinz Kerry is bracing herself for some probing questions about why the Heinz charities she runs, which distribute some $100m a year, give so little to needy causes in Mozambique. The money, like the Heinz in her name, comes from her first husband, the late (Republican) Senator John Heinz. The Kerry team is so worried about Teresa's "negatives" that they are talking of making a Clinton-style ten-minute biopic of the putative first lady to screen at the Democratic convention, portraying her as Mother Teresa and her father as Albert Schweitzer.
Heinz means no more conspiracies
Get ready for a Clinton-era replay. The centre for the study of popular culture, a conservative research operation part-funded by the right-wing zillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, has accused Teresa of being the "bag lady for the radical left." The Heinz Foundation has channelled $4m to radical groups who support "environmental extremism, anti-war protest and... transgender advocacy" through something called the Tides Centre, which specialises in giving funds to groups too small to qualify for the usual donors. (In fact, all the Heinz funds went to mundane environmental groups.) Scaife was the guy who funded the more virulent of the right-wing attacks on the Clintons, and published bizarre suspicions of eerie White House murders in his Pittsburgh Tribune Review. But this time Scaife has trouble at home: his wife Barbara Ritchie Scaife is a personal friend of Teresa, and has just donated $2,000 to the Kerry campaign.
Why Bush needs sport
It's not just because this is an Olympics year that Bush is getting so interested in sport. Suddenly he's attending Nascar races and rodeos (both of which he last did as governor of Texas), putting himself before the Superbowl audience with a pre-game interview, inviting stock cars to gouge ruts in the White House lawn, making well publicised visits to bait and tackle shops. The real motivation is the fact that macho John Kerry once graced the cover of American Windsurfer magazine and enlivened the New Hampshire primary with an impromptu ice hockey game.
Darn all those vacation locations
If Long Devil and his African American wife make it to the White House, they could have trouble picking their equivalent of Bush's Crawford ranch, Reagan's Rancho del Cielo, or the Bush family's Kennebunkport country spread. They probably won't use the Boston townhouse on Louisburg Square (too urban), nor the $4m Georgetown mansion (too close), nor the $3m estate in Pittsburgh (too gritty). They might use the $6m estate on Nantucket Island for the summer, but in winter they'll doubtless head for the $5m ski lodge in Sun Valley, Idaho - once a 15th-century English barn before it was carefully knocked down for re-assembly across the ocean. The locals should by then have got over their annoyance at the Heinz-Kerry attempt to divert a local river to water their vast lawn. And the Boston city fathers might even admit how much they were paid to move the fire hydrant outside the townhouse so that Kerry could park his car without getting a ticket.
Teresa in the bath
The family joke says that if Long Devil wins in November, Teresa will doubtless be in the bath. She learned of Kerry's unexpected win in the Iowa caucuses while she was watching him shave. And she learned of the New Hampshire victory while in the shower. "It seems to be a bathroom event," she tells friends. Heaven knows where she'll be if he gets re-elected in 2008.
