From: Steve (scatanzaro4_at_cox.net)
Date: 2004-10-10 18:34:10
yah yah, you’re tired of george bush and his connections buyin him that
Harvard mba, the honorable discharge, the baseball team, and the
presidency. you want the realness, right?
then look to john kerry, the first true hip hop candidate… I mean, he
did tell mtv that hip hop was his favorite music, remember? (“ya better
listen to hip hop, ya heard” or words to that effect?)
you’re skeptical? take a lesson, son. john kerry doesn’t just LISTEN to
hip hop… he LIVES it.
while puffy, snoop dogg, fity cent and the rest had to make their
millions slinging samples and rhymes, kerry did it in true hip hop
stylee;
he gives new meaning to the term:: BIG PIMPIN’ ::
from today’s NY Times…
In winter, he goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife's Idaho
retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and
reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River in Sun Valley. In summer,
he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another
home. The couple have an 18th-century town house in Boston where the
kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room town house in
Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh area estate, a private Gulfstream jet
and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.
If Mr. Kerry is elected, he and his wife will be the richest couple ever
to live in the White House, said Kevin Phillips, a political commentator
and the author of "Wealth and Democracy.''
Even adjusting for inflation, their net worth far surpasses that of such
wealthy predecessors as John F. Kennedy and his wife. In an election
driven in large part by the candidates' personalities, that
extraordinary wealth and the air of privilege Mr. Kerry seems to carry
with him have often been a stumbling block, exacerbating the perception
that he is an aloof man whose elite tastes separate him from the
concerns of ordinary people.
Mr. Kerry and his wife are also cursed with the kind of good taste that
suggests old money. On the walls of their Boston and Washington town
houses hang a collection of Dutch and Flemish still lifes mostly from
the 17th century, so precious that the insurance company asks that the
artwork not be photographed. Visitors comment on the restrained
stylishness of the couple's homes, at least two of which were decorated
by Mark Hampton, the New York designer who counted Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis, Estée Lauder and Pamela Harriman among his clients.
After college, Mr. Kerry continued to orbit a world of unusual
privilege, thanks in part to his first wife, Julia Thorne, who came from
a very wealthy family with Colonial origins. When the couple divorced in
1988, Mr. Kerry went through some lean years, relying on his government
salary as he shuttled back and forth from Washington to Boston, where he
was busy helping to raise two young daughters. This was the time later
dubbed his "gypsy period" by his second wife - when he sometimes lacked
a place to live in one city or another, and had to rely on friends or
supporters for help. But all that came to a decisive end in May 1995,
when he married Teresa Heinz.
About 100 close friends and relatives attended the ceremony, which took
place during a chilly spring afternoon on the lawn outside her Nantucket
home. Afterward, the wedding party took over a highly regarded island
restaurant, the Chanticleer Inn, where every place setting was decorated
with a tiny bottle of Heinz ketchup. At one point, the bride's son,
Chris Heinz, teasingly daubed Mr. Kerry on the forehead with ketchup, to
welcome him into the family and its tomato-based fortune, recalled Mr.
Sanders, one of the guests. Later, the guests danced to a band called -
inauspiciously, perhaps - the French Millionaires.
Mr. Kerry's life changed at that point, and not just because the
marriage made him happier. The couple bought and renovated a five-story
18th-century town house on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill, giving the
senator a permanent home in his home state at last. He also gained a
Washington home, Ms. Heinz Kerry's 23-room town house in Georgetown, and
the two vacation homes in Idaho and Nantucket.
Seen from the outside, those houses are not especially ostentatious. The
Sun Valley house, for instance, at the end of a 100-yard driveway about
a mile north of town, is smaller than many of its neighbors, and
rendered invisible from the road by landscaping. The Nantucket house is
set on a small lot, with a screened-in porch, and a green and white
loveseat swing on the front lawn.
It is the neighbors who are unusual. In Idaho, the billionaire financier
George Soros lives next door. Just across the river is Steve Wynn, the
billionaire Las Vegas casino executive; also nearby are the actor Tom
Hanks and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. The Nantucket house
is on Brant Point, an area so sought after that a vacant lot there sold
last year for $8 million after the house on it burned down, said Dalton
Frazier, an island real estate agent.
Mr. Kerry and his wife also have at least eight cars, including three
sport utility vehicles at the Idaho house. He also has a Harley-Davidson
motorcycle.
Another area where Ms. Heinz Kerry's wealth has left a visible imprint
is sports. Mr. Kerry had always been an outdoorsman and a superb athlete
who went skiing, biking and boating whenever he could.
"Now he carries those on in more places," Cameron Kerry said.
The senator owns two bicycles made by Serotta, including an Otrott
model, which usually sells for about $8,000. In summer, he goes
windsurfing and kite-boarding off the coast of Nantucket. He has had a
number of boats over the years, but about three years ago he bought a
more opulent one: a 42-foot Little Harbor powerboat, purchased for about
$500,000. The boat has sleeping berths for two, and Mr. Kerry mostly
uses it to cruise along the Massachusetts coast, or to ride with friends
out to Nantucket.
It is on the water, Mr. Kerry's friends and relatives all say, that he
is most at ease. Seven or eight years ago, Mr. Sanders recalled, Mr.
Kerry invited him to Cape Cod, where the two men got into Mr. Kerry's
boat to ride out to Nantucket. As the boat reached open water, Mr. Kerry
took the throttle up to full speed. Flicking on the boat's stereo
system, he shouted, "Check it out!" and a broad grin lit up his face.
The music blasting from the speakers was Wagner's "The Ride of the
Valkyries," the same sequence played by Robert Duvall's character in the
Vietnam movie "Apocalypse Now."
Last month, Mr. Kerry visited his old windsurfing pal John Chao, founder
of American Windsurfer magazine, near the Columbia River Gorge in
Oregon. The weather was calm, forcing them to cancel their windsurfing
jaunt, and Mr. Kerry said he would fly back in a few days if the breeze
picked up. Mr. Chao, sensing that a flight across country just to go
windsurfing might play into the rich sportsman stereotype, advised him
against it.
Mr. Kerry agreed not to fly back, but added that he did not want to
change his lifestyle for the sake of appearances. Mr. Chao recalled, "He
said: 'I'm not going to live my life in fear. I'm going to be who I am.'
''
u go john kerry! a playa’s gotta play!!!