Rasmusen's Politics Weblog

Teresa Heinz Kerry's Cookies

The Teresa's Cookies story came out in late July while I was on holiday in British Columbia, but the peculiarity of Teresa Heinz Kerry is worth noting. What I thought were Kerry's few good points are disappearing. He doesn't seem to have been a war hero after all. And I used to be impressed that managed to get Teresa Heinz to marry him. Now it seems she is paranoid, disloyal to her staff, and quite willing to confess to proffering a cookie recipe as her own which was not. Shades of Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars?....

...

Here is the New York Times report on the story.

Ever since voters began telling Teresa Heinz Kerry that they didn't think much of the pumpkin spice cookie recipe her office had submitted to Family Circle's presidential cookie bake-off, an aide said, Mrs. Heinz Kerry, the wife of the about-to-be Democratic nominee, has been thinking how she could tell America the truth: the recipe isn't hers.

In an interview on National Public Radio that was broadcast yesterday, the cookies came up in conversation and in the direct, unvarnished style that people have come to expect, Mrs. Heinz Kerry said: "Somebody at my office gave that recipe out and, in fact, I think somebody really made it on purpose to give a nasty recipe. I never made pumpkin cookies; I don't like pumpkin spice cookies."

Mrs. Heinz Kerry had originally submitted a recipe called Yummy Wonders, but, according to Family Circle, its test kitchen said the recipe did not work. When the magazine called her press office and asked if there had been a mistake, the press office sent the pumpkin cookie recipe without consulting her, said her press secretary, Marla Romash.

...

The recipe, and a Laura Bush recipe for oatmeal-chocolate chunk cookies, were published in the July issue of the magazine. Readers were asked to vote on their favorite.

...

Ms. Romash, who when she is not working in politics runs a baking-catering business, agrees with her boss. "If you tasted those cookies," she said, "you'd think someone was trying to do you harm, too."

Ms. Romash would not say why Mrs. Heinz Kerry would think an aide would want to harm her.

Not everyone agrees with Mrs. Heinz Kerry: in taste tests on television programs, tasters were evenly divided, said Susan Ungaro, editor in chief of Family Circle

Note Family Circle's retaliation-- if she hadn't been so rude they wouldn't have told us that her first, presumably authentic, recipe was so bad they wouldn't inflict it on their readers.

So another of John Kerry's strong points evaporates. I wonder if he really went to Yale?