The American Spectator

p> LI’L ORPHAN JOHNNY br> It’s expected that Sen. John Kerry saw an uptick in fundraising for his presidential campaign this financial quarter ending today. Kerry is now expected to report pulling in around $11 million. Part of his success is due to the continuing perception — borne out by polling data — that he’s firming up his status as a front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. /p>

Another reason may be the story floated by his own campaign that due to campaign finance laws, he won’t be able to draw on the vast fortune that his wife Teresa Heinz Kerry’s inherited from her previous husband, the late Sen. John Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

“We don’t know how much he can actually use from her fortune,” says a Kerry campaign staffer in Washington. “But whether he can use any of it or all of it, the perception that he was loaded and could self-finance the campaign was hurting our bottom line.”

By this, the staffer means, Kerry and his fundraisers were finding it difficult to get Democrats to cut donation checks because so much talk at the time involved how Kerry had the cash on hand to basically pay for his own campaign. Heinz-Kerry is believed to have a personal worth of more than $400 million, and, conceivably, half of that could be identified by hubby John as “shared” wealth, which he could use to finance parts of his campaign. The running joke in Washington has been that the definition of a Kerry fundraiser is whenever Kerry gets into bed with his wife.

“We were doing okay, fundraising, but the question was always popping up, ‘Isn’t your man going to spend his own money?’” says the Kerry staffer. “I think by putting out that story that the Senator probably could not use his wife’s money, we increased our fundraising by at least ten or fifteen percent.”

Beyond the questions their own fundraisers were getting, were the questions about Kerry’s money that fundraisers for other candidates were planting. The Gephardt and Edwards campaigns especially were citing their need for cash — and Kerry’s lack of a need due to his wife’s fortune — as reasons to help them early on and not Kerry.

“It wasn’t necessarily with the big donors, but the small donors, the ones we could go back to three or four times before hitting the limit,” says the Kerry staffer. “And it’s tough to get fundraisers motivated when they think they are working for Daddy Warbucks.”

Or, in this case, the husband of Mommy Warbucks.

p> INVALID TOKEN