John Kerry’s daughters, Vanessa (left) and Alexandra, at the venue of the Democrat Convention in Boston. (AFP)

Cape Canaveral (Florida), July 26 (Reuters): Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry defended his outspoken wife Teresa Heinz Kerry today after she bluntly told a reporter to “shove it.”

“My wife speaks her mind appropriately,” the Massachusetts senator said during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral where he promoted US innovation and ingenuity.

At a reception yesterday in Massachusetts, Heinz Kerry, a philanthropist and heir to the family food fortune, told Democratic Party delegates from her home state of Pennsylvania there needed to be a change in American politics.

“We have to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics,” she said. Morning television shows broadcast the remarks.

When a reporter from a conservative Pennsylvania newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, pressed Heinz Kerry what she had meant by “un-American” she said repeatedly: “No, I didn’t say that, I didn’t say that.”

She then turned away only to return moments later. “You said something I didn’t say, now shove it,” she said, pointing her finger at the reporter.

Asked about Heinz Kerry’s comments, her spokeswoman Marla Romash said: “It was a moment of extreme frustration aimed at a Right-wing rag that has consistently and almost purposefully misrepresented the facts when reporting on Mrs Heinz Kerry.”

Kerry’s 65-year-old second wife, the widow of the late Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, has been criticised as a loose cannon but prefers to think of herself as a free spirit.

“I’m too old to be embarrassed,” she told reporters during a conversation on her husband’s campaign plane at the weekend as Kerry trekked across country to the Democratic convention in Boston where he will formally accept his party’s nomination as President George W. Bush’s opponent in the November 2 election.

Heinz Kerry, who will speak at the convention on Wednesday night, said she would talk for about 20 minutes, including applause, and that she had been practicing using a TelePrompTer for the first time. Kerry has read her speech.

She will allude to her background, the daughter of a doctor raised under a repressive dictatorship in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique and schooled in racially segregated South Africa.