Chris' brother Andre is also a good-looking guy and possibly the only environmentalist who has a side trade in stand-up. "I haf known John Kewey now for many yeahs," intoned Andre at a pre-primary Kerry rally in Derry, N.H., in pitch-perfect imitation of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dressed in a red button-down and green pants, he went on to mimic Bob Dole and George Bush the elder in what felt like a recap of "Saturday Night Live's" past 15 years. Andre concluded by going fuzzy-voiced and saying, "I feel your joy, I feel your pain. If you want another president who has even better hair than I do, I think we should elect John!" Hey, a stepson who can do a good Clinton is not to be scoffed at, especially when, like Kerry, your attempts at cool have included a rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" at a fundraiser. Think bludgeoned cats.

The eldest Heinz brother is so far not part of the campaign. In fact, he doesn't seem to be much of a joiner. Teresa told Washington Post reporter Mark Leibovich in June 2002 that one of her sons -- presumably John IV, who has fathered her only grandchild, a daughter -- "hates" her. Not much more has been said about him since, except that he is a reclusive Pennsylvania Buddhist who runs a school for wayward kids and is ... a blacksmith.

Kerry's daughters have only recently turned up on the trail. Alexandra, 30, is a brunet filmmaker from Los Angeles who doesn't seem keen on talking, and in a twist reminiscent of Rep. Nancy Pelosi's daughter Alexandra, has turned her camera on the journalists swarming her father. Vanessa, 26, is a talkative blonde studying to be a doctor at Harvard and obviously working on her role as the "lighten up, Dad" daughter, as Karenna was for Al Gore. It has been written that the Kerry girls, who spent a significant amount of time being raised by their father after their parents' divorce, had a hard time adjusting to Teresa's presence in their lives. It doesn't take a psychotherapist or an expert in serialized drama to guess that a hot-tempered heiress who had raised three sons might throw a wrench into a house where two young women were used to having their father to themselves. "We worked at it," Vanessa told the New York Post, "and now we're really close."

This is not your parents' first family. Other families have had scandals: Amy Carter's activist years ... Patti Davis' political dissent ... the Bush twins' illegal drinking ... Bill Clinton. But there has always been a team of communications people and press aides rushing around, whitewashing events, telling us to look the other way. It looked as if that would happen in the Kerry campaign as well, as early stories basically served to fit Teresa for a muzzle. But here they are, the majority of the mixed clan, walking and talking to the press. They aren't scandals; they're characters, archetypes in some cases, mold breakers in others. They have already smashed prime-time and certainly presidential rules for language, talked about divorce and abortion. And who doesn't love the Botox story? Who knows if he did it or not! Who cares? The only definitive observation is that his eyebrows no longer move. But God bless John and Teresa and their botulism. We look forward to upcoming episodes in which we deal with a Klonopin addiction, the return of the Buddhist blacksmith son, and a recurring character played by Kathy Bates.

I don't mean to make fun. Everyone's families are screwed up. But, as Kerry stammered at his wife recently, that's the point. The Heinz-Kerrys are made of the very stuff from which multigenerational American melodrama is built -- whether that means John Updike or Jackie Collins or Tony Soprano. And that drama is in turn an outsized reflection of real American life. Callous as it may seem to reduce the true losses and traumas of an American family to melodrama, it is perhaps more respectful than viewing them through the same outdated prescriptive lens we have trained on our politicians' home lives for generations. In some ways, television -- even whiny, turgid television -- is more honest about the state of the American family than politics is. We live in an age in which the terms "voters" and "viewers" have become synonymous, in which "reality" and "television" are inextricably linked. Our most popular presidents of the past decades have been Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, cinematic men whose family dramas have been (ineffectively) tamped down by spinmeisters who prefer that presidential kids never hate their parents, that divorces are always amicable, that no one diddles their interns. And while we're at it, all the pets are housebroken, Sundays are church days, and everyone takes turns setting the table.

The Heinz-Kerrys are beginning to let it all hang out. We can look forward to eating it up with a spoon. Perhaps it's a fantasy that if political spinmeisters spent less time managing the family image, they would be able to devote more time to sprucing up the politics. And if that is a pipe dream, so be it. So far, allowing us to see this bunch of loons up close has only made their dull patriarch -- the man who may be elected president -- more palatable.

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