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 élite 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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