John Kerry recently appeared on The Daily Show. with Jon Stewart. I didn't see it, and I'm not at all broken up by that. Don't get me wrong, I love The Daily Show, but John Stewart is such a disgustingly flagrant liberal that I can hardly stomach it when he has Dems on the show (e.g. like when he had Bill Clinton on to attack President Bush a few weeks ago.)

According to the article, the following exchange took place:

Stewart also sought answers to another hard-hitting question: "Is it true that every time I use ketchup, your wife gets a nickel?" The candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is heir to the Heinz food fortune.

"Would that it were," Kerry said.

What the hell does that mean? "Would that it were?"

I assume it's a New England thing? Or maybe it's an Kerryish-intellectual thing that is so far beyond my lowly, uneducated, easily confused understanding? Or, perhaps before going on the show, Kerry punched "what kinds of coloquialisms do normal people use?" into google and got back a lemon? I don't know, but, in any event, we certainly don't say things like that in Midwest. And I've never heard anyone use the phrase anywhere else in the country, either, and I've lived in a lot of places.

A google search shed no light on the answer. Maybe someone out there can fill me in on not only what this phrase means, but also where it's used and where it came from?