OUT OF IOWA.(The Talk of the Town)

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, Teresa Heinz Kerry told a rally of more than a thousand Democrats at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines that she "felt very at home" in Iowa. "It's almost like where I grew up," she said, which was startling, because her husband, the senator and Presidential candidate John Kerry, had just told the crowd that she grew up in Mozambique. Like many Americans, she is a naturalized citizen, and in her childhood knew America only "as an ideal," Kerry said. She "never saw her father vote till he was seventy-one years old, because they lived in a dictatorship."

The Senator was losing his voice. He resorted frequently to a water bottle, but his throat refused to produce anything more than a ragged stage whisper. Still, he sounded positively stentorian in comparison with his wife. Although she held the mike close, her words, tinged with a lilting Portuguese accent, never rose above a breathy murmur. The audience fell silent and listened as if eavesdropping on a private soliloquy.

Heinz Kerry, who inherited a vast fortune from her first husband, John Heinz, the ketchup heir and a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, is known for the surprising turns of her unscripted public pronouncements. She can be nearly as unbuttoned in her speech as Kerry is buttoned up in his, with the result that she is sometimes impolitic and always worth listening to. Now she pursued her unlikely comparison of Iowa and Africa, finding that the Hawkeye state measured up well against the mother continent. There was "the earthiness" of the Iowans, and there was the "sparse, very clean, very beautiful" landscape, and there were the little farming towns with their churches, just like the settlements known as "dorps" in southern Africa. She liked the word "dorps"; it seemed to make Iowa more real to her.

Never mind that Iowa's population is ninety-four per cent white and that the place is harrowingly cold in January. Teresa Heinz Kerry had a larger point to make. She had spent a lot of time in Iowa, stumping for her husband, and, despite the comforting sense of familiarity, she said, "I was shy in the beginning." She hadn't been able to articulate why she was resistant to politicking until John Norris, Kerry's campaign manager in Iowa, who helped organize post-communist elections in Macedonia, told her that the biggest challenge there had been getting newly democratized politicians to come out and ask people to support them. "I realized that deep inside here I am still afraid of a turnaround in the political system where you get punished or you lose your job or get sent to jail," she said. "Even though I'm not afraid to stand up myself, I was shy about asking people to vote."

The candidate's wife had come to praise Iowa, but her initial unease with the Democratic nominating system there was well founded. After ...