"My right to speak my mind, to have a voice, to be what some have called 'opinionated'" -- and here Heinz Kerry deployed killer air quotes -- "is a right I deeply and profoundly cherish. My only hope is that, one day soon, women -- who have all earned the right to their opinions -- instead of being labeled opinionated, will be called smart or well-informed, just as men are." It was a sentiment so simple that it was radical. Radical in that it returned to the most basic tenets of the feminist movement. It was about as obvious as that old t-shirt slogan: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."

Here was a woman -- with a foreign birth certificate, graduate degree, Republican resume, two husbands, three sons, and 500 million dollars in the bank - who has held fast to the most American and democratic of beliefs: that it is her right as a citizen to be her own wacked-out, Botoxed, pumpkin-cookie-hating, dead-husband-loving, Socratic self. But she has repeatedly been weighed on a scale set for women expected to whittle away their personalities until they are as anemic as their waists or their libidos. Even the smartest and most dynamic of our recent first ladies, and yes, I'm talking about the Senator from New York, have sometimes given in and allowed themselves to be shaped into what the pollsters say they need to be: content when they are really restless, reverent when they are really questioning, loving and supportive when they really want to take a pair of garden shears to their husband's wandering members.

Of course the speech was not all as invigorating as her discourse on women's rights -- her whispered tone and hypnotic cadence can get downright soporific. Things got a little worrisome when she started to talk about the Galileo and Hubble spacecrafts; she was, alas, briefly in orbit herself. But that's part of what this woman is: weird and rambly and generally unpredictable. In fact, if there were one real complaint about her appearance on Tuesday, it's that her husband's team of handlers seemed to have persuaded her to stay on script.

Commentators would soon start picking apart her performance: She didn't talk enough about her husband as a person; she was wonky; she was dry; she was quiet. A few generous observers did acknowledge that she looked hot. But in the end, she gave a speech that answered them all. Part of her point was that according to the principles that she and her husband advocate, she could have read the phone book on-stage for an hour. It is her right to speak at all -- and to say whatever she feels like saying -- that is at stake when we talk about questioning our government, participating in the process, demanding what we deserve from our leaders. Speaking of Kerry, Heinz Kerry said, "he believes that our voices -- yours and mine -- must be the voices of freedom. And if we do not speak, neither does she."

Let her keep speaking.

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