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Townsend seems uncertain about how much to rely on her famous name. "People are electing Kathleen Townsend," she says. Then she corrects herself. "They are electing Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. I don't intend to hide the fact that I'm a Kennedy." While her posters promote her as Kathleen Townsend, her literature uses all three names. Townsend has been accused of carpetbagging, even though her husband grew up in the district and teaches nearby. When Republicans complain that she is a newcomer, she replies with a humor and bite characteristic of her late father, "The Republicans, of all people, should be pleased that a wife has followed her husband to Maryland."
While their opponents grumble about the Kennedy name and the attendant media fuss, both Joe and Kathleen are trying to wage issue-oriented campaigns. Though his broad smile and raw physical presence recall his father's energy and charisma, Joe Kennedy's politics are not quite Robert Kennedy's. After completing an academic career that included stints at three colleges (he finally graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Boston), Kennedy founded a nonprofit corporation called Citizens Energy Corp., which provides inexpensive heating fuel and prescription drugs to low-income families. Citing his company's solid success in almost every speech, Kennedy mixes '60s liberalism with '80s pragmatism. His message is one of populist entrepreneurship, but Bachrach told the New York Times that Kennedy is the "candidate of the right in this race," fighting words in a district that went overwhelmingly for Walter Mondale.
Townsend is more clearly her father's philosophical heir, and she matches him in seriousness. A Harvard graduate and a lawyer, she has worked for the Massachusetts and Maryland attorney generals. Like her father, she chops the air with her palm when she speaks, and she talks compassionately of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. It remains to be seen whether she can move a district that is predominantly Democratic but moderate.
"Every morning," Townsend says of her childhood, "each child was required to recite three current events, and on Sundays the older children were expected to make a speech about a personality in the news." Now the eldest children of Robert Kennedy are hoping to bring that ingrained interest in public matters to Washington. The upcoming primaries will be a test of their old family football cheer: "Clap your hands! Stamp your feet! 'Cause Daddy's team can't be beat."