Kurtz on the THK kurfluffles

WaPo's Howard Kurtz has a funny, link-filled article on Theresa Heinz-Kerry's (or does she prefer the unhyphenated version?) comments about First Lady Laura Bush, in which he reports that NPR has video footage of the gaffe, and then muses:

We don't really vote for first lady. She kind of comes with the package. But if the candidates are going to have their wives out there campaigning for them, I guess they have to take their lumps when the spouse goes off message.

Well, yes.  So it has been back to FDR's days and well beyond.  Mr. Kurtz wonders whether "this more important than, oh, I don't know, American soldiers dying in Iraq?"  Well, no; of course not.  But there's bandwidth and column space and airtime enough to discuss all of these things, and more; Mr. Kurtz found space in his WaPo article to mention Sen. Kerry's geese, for instance, just as there was time at the DNC for Licorice the Unlucky Hamster and at the RNC for the Bush twins' riff on growing up with Dubya.

And certainly we all need some comic relief, some distraction from more weighty issues.  In fact, I'd one-up TRN's Noam Scheiber, as linked from Mr. Kurtz's article, and suggest that the most attractive Kerry counterspin (to be made by suitably distanced proxies, and leaked only to Judith Miller-types who'd go to jail before breaching their promises of confidentiality) would be to argue that Ms. Heinz-Kerry would be a formidable asset in a Kerry presidency precisely because of the comic relief she'd offer for the next four years.  Alas, from the look on Ms. Heinz-Kerry's face after her husband's debate joke at her expense about marrying up, I suspect Judith Miller would end up preferring a jail cell to facing THK's prolonged wrath, and Sen. Kerry's probably too tall to fit comfortably on any of the couches in the White House anyway.