Republicans see red as ketchup war gets saucy

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles


Forget Iraq. Or terrorism. What the 2004 US presidential election is really about is a fight over politically incorrect fast food.

After the furore over French fries being renamed "freedom fries", battle has been joined over another item on the menu - tomato ketchup.

Heinz, the country's leading ketchup maker, is directly linked to John Kerry, President George W. Bush's Democratic Party challenger. Kerry's wife, Teresa, is the widow of John Heinz, and so controls roughly 4 per cent of Heinz stock. Could it be that with every squirt, fast-food-loving Republicans contribute to Democratic Party campaign coffers?

Such was the thinking behind a new line called W Ketchup, which hit the stores a month ago. "You don't support Democrats. Why should your ketchup?" went the slogan. An initial run of 48,000 bottles sold out in no time.

Now the plot - if not the sauce - is thickening fast. A second Republican-friendly product called Bush Country Ketchup is trying to muscle in on W's act. "We can no longer allow W Ketchup to masquerade as a conservative condiment and continue to market itself to our fellow Republicans without answering several troubling questions that have come to light," wrote Bush Country Ketchup's founders on their website a few days ago.

It turns out the W of W Ketchup does not refer to Bush's middle initial, but to Washington, as in George Washington, whose likeness adorns the label.

And W Ketchup founder Bill Zachary has described his product as "non-partisan" and himself as politically "middle of the road".

"W Ketchup appears to be trying to have it every which way, engaging in Kerry-esque flip-flopping and capitalising on conservatives' affectionate use of President Bush's middle initial," wrote Bush Country co-founder Patrick Spero.

But while Bush Country Ketchup has a Republican Party elephant balancing a tomato in its trunk with the slogan "Making sure Kerry won't ketchup to Dubya", it, too, has a dirty secret. The manufacturer of its fancy US$5.99-a-bottle gourmet ketchup is from San Francisco, where Democrat-loving foodies have shunned Heinz for years - for strictly gastronomic reasons. Clearly, the sauce will be flying for some time.

- INDEPENDENT