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It is a place, she says, where she never imagined she would be. Kathleen once considered becoming a nun and spent time planting pistachio trees on a New Mexico reservation. When she got married, her bridesmaids gave her a potter's wheel. "I didn't think I'd run for political office," she told TIME. "I grew up in a family that loved politics, but it was for the men, not the women." The women, she said, were "supposed to work hard." And unlike the boys, to toe the line. Her letters to her grandmother Rose came back full of corrections, written in red.
But with the women's movement, Kathleen says, came an awareness of "strengths in me I hadn't recognized." She is not always the steadiest politician--she is known for mangling the language in a way that seems more genetically Bush than Kennedy, with coinages such as "Hispanish"--but she has shaken off most of the doubts that Maryland's political elite once had about her. And no Kennedy of her generation has been as skillful as Kathleen at enjoying the benefits of being American royalty without being swallowed by them. Kathleen "lobbied the hell out of us" to nail down a prime-time speaking slot at last year's Democratic National Convention, says a former Gore-campaign official. (But she lost the high-profile gig to her cousin Caroline, the princess of Camelot.)
In a family that stands for liberalism, Kathleen maintains an ideological separation. She is a stalwart of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, an organization Patrick once blasted for "jeopardizing our values." And she supports the death penalty not because it is a deterrent, she explains, but because there are "awful people" who don't "have a right to live."
Her uncle Ted once told the Washington Post that if you took a secret ballot of the family, Kathleen would be voted most responsible. It's one comparison she doesn't mind. "The Democratic Party got away from believing personal responsibility was part of our agenda," she says. "But I've always believed it was part of mine." For the Kennedy who is trying to getting it right, that's not a bad place to start.
--With reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington
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