NEW ORLEANS - Kathleen Blanco is the quiet eye in the storm around her.

Dressed in her trademark blue suit, the jacket open to the two-string costume pearl necklace she has used this year because it's large enough not to misplace or leave behind, Blanco is serene, seeming to ignore the undulating semi-circle of television cameras and still photographers whirling about her, some walking backward, others dropping back and swooping back around in front like birds fighting to be in front of a flock. Behind her is a mass of supporters.

Blanco stops to shake hands with a friend, smiling, looking into their eyes. "Hello, how are you doing?" she says, her eyes characteristically twinkling. "Things are going very well. They couldn't be going any better."

The 60-year-old Democrat is so calm, it's as if she is oblivious to the media frenzy about her.

She has just appeared at a press conference in which she got the official endorsement of U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson, the New Orleans Democrat who is Louisiana's ranking black elected official, as well as such prominent New Orleans Democrats as Councilwoman Renee Pratt and state Sens. Diana Bajoie and Paulette Irons and several suburban white politicians, including Jefferson President-elect Aaron Broussard, formerly mayor of Kenner.

"We represent the faces of Louisiana," Blanco said. "We are going to make it work. No one of us is smarter than we are collectively."

Jefferson is reassuring that black political leaders are coming together to turn out the traditional black base of the Democratic Party. "Yes, it is going to be a full-court press."

Nearby, New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who later would hold his own endorsement press conference in New Orleans, agrees. "It's coming together," says Jordan, who, as U.S. attorney, led the successful prosecution of former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards on gambling racketeering charges.

"There is more diversity here. She is poised to win this race. Bobby Jindal did not even call me," Jordan says, grinning. "Maybe he assumed I was predisposed, which I am as a Democrat, to support Blanco. But you reach out to everyone."

Finding her base

Reaching out to black voters is something Blanco has done, dating to her support for civil rights in the 1960s. And she's done it as a conservative Democrat, as a candidate who has a history of beating better-financed white Republicans, beginning with her winning a state House seat in 1983 and leading all the way to her victory for the lieutenant governor's position first in 1996.

Blanco is very steady and deliberate, not given to mood changes or temper.

"She is always the calm at the center of the storm swirling about her," said Rochelle Michaud Dugas, who has traveled with Blanco for months in her quest to become the first woman to be elected governor of Louisiana. "Even when she gets angry, which is rare, it's not bad."

Blanco's outburst of temper usually consists of rolling her eyes and sighing. No loud words. No change in her color. And, says Cynthia Dupree, who joined Blanco's campaign as fund-raiser after raising money for defeated Democrat Attorney General Richard Ieyoub in the Oct. 4 gubernatorial primary. "It's over in about five seconds. It's amazing."

Blanco spent the first two weeks of her runoff campaign reorganizing, calling in additional staff and former aides to take what basically was a three-person staff operating mainly out of the kitchen of her Lafayette home to Lafayette and Baton Rouge offices.

Typical for a Democratic campaign, it has been a rocky road with scheduling gaffes and missed messages, only recently coming together in a cohesive, organic way. "I wasn't getting the messages," Blanco said.

U.S. Sen. John Breaux loaned his state director, Bob Mann, to help with travel and press coordination. U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu sent down her chief of staff, Norma Jane Sabiston, who helped pull together Landrieu's Senate victory over Republican Suzanne Terrell last year.

Family, friends are first

Blanco and her husband, Raymond, vice president of student affairs at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, got their start in politics in 1971, when they went against the Cajun wave of support for Edwards to back a then little-known state senator from Shreveport, J. Bennett Johnston, for governor.

"Lafayette was caught up with the fervor of Edwards becoming the first Cajun governor," said Johnston, who remains a close friend of the Blancos. "Kathleen and Raymond stuck their necks out to support me."

Kathleen Blanco was pregnant but ran the Johnston campaign headquarters in Lafayette. After Edwards nudged Johnston in a very close December runoff in 1971, they were among the young twenty-somethings who stayed with Johnston's 1972 challenge to six-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Allen Ellender, who died on an airplane during the race. Johnston remained in the Senate until 1996, when Landrieu succeeded him.

The Johnstons and the Blancos are in a four-couple group that has hunted together the week after Christmas every year since. The others: state Sen. Willie Mount and her husband, Ben, of Lake Charles, and defeated Democratic gubernatorial candidate Claude "Buddy" Leach and his wife, Laura. Mary Johnston, Willie Mount and Kathleen Blanco love to hunt together. Like many Cajun women, Blanco has hunted and fished since she was a child.

For Blanco, it was a childhood that helped shaped helped shape her continuing devotion to family first.

As a child, she entertained her younger sisters by reading them the Bible at bedtime.

"She read us the Samson story," said her sister Priscilla Caldwell of Richland, Wash., one of seven Babineaux children who grew up on a farm near New Iberia. "We loved the story that you could cut the guy's hair and he could lose all this power, that this woman could sway him like that."

And Blanco herself picked up the hair-cutting skill, cutting her brothers' and sisters' hair then using it to save money with her own family. "I cut hair until very recently. I can cut anyone's hair."

More than a marriage

Blanco's husband, Raymond, came into the political scope in the runoff, when Gov. Mike Foster said on his radio show that if she is elected governor, Raymond "would be the most powerful man in Louisiana." It caused a brief uproar, now the subject of joking by Blanco.

The couple, partners in politics for years, tend to rendezvous these days, separated by her days on the road and him staying home fielding telephone calls and watching campaign spending, aided by their five surviving children.

A sixth child, Ben, was crushed to death by falling steel in an industrial accident at his brother Ray's side in January 1997, when their father told the brothers they needed to work rather than join friends on a snow-skiing holiday during the winter break. Guided by her deep faith, Kathleen Blanco gave an emotional eulogy at the funeral still remembered by attendees.

The Blancos bucked the trend, growing closer rather than apart, as do most couples who lose a child. This campaign is a family group effort.

Raymond and Kathleen Blanco met this past week at a fund-raiser at the posh University Lake home of software magnate Barry Bellue, whose previous company became Symantec and, after he sold that firm, has created another firm, Thinkstream, that is testing a new law enforcement software system.

"You get two minutes," jokes campaign aide Malcolm Myers. "After that, she goes back to work."

The Blancos, who will have a rare night together at the lieutenant governor's official Pentagon Barracks apartment, kiss briefly, then separate as they both work the assembled crowd of Democratic financial and political powerhouses, including Shaw Group executives, state Sen. Kip Holden, state Rep. William Daniel and AFL-CIO Vice President Sybil Holt.

After an hour, it's time for the candidate to speak.

"She has a very, very powerful grace under pressure," Bellue said. "The fact that her staff speaks so benevolently of her speaks volumes."

Blanco, whose campaign raised in excess of $200,000 at the party, deadpans her introduction of Raymond.

"I want to introduce my husband, who will soon be the most powerful man in Louisiana," Blanco says, triggering hooting and whistling. "The man will be the go-to man in Louisiana."

Then, when the laughter is over, she turns serious. "We are a good team. We have been for 39 years and have six children who are the wealth in our lives. I'm not really too concerned about the governor's comments."

At the dining room, over an elaborate liquid chocolate fountain into which one put skewered fruit, Kathleen Blanco enjoys a couple of grapes awashed in the chocolate. Dessert is something she's always enjoyed.

Breaking barriers

Blanco says she knew in January, at a gathering of gubernatorial want-to-bes at an education forum in Baton Rouge, that she would make the race, and, more than likely, the runoff. She knows that it was the decision of her friend Buddy Leach to make the race that helped her the most. Had Leach not cut into Ieyoub's base, the person in the runoff might be the attorney general, not the lieutenant governor.

"I always knew I could get into the runoff with 18 percent." That's what she got. Jindal got 33 percent. Some 7 out of 10 voters chose Democrats. Ieyoub was at her heels, at more than 16 percent, followed closely by Leach at 14 percent. Both have since endorsed her.

"We have pulled back up now that we are back on TV."

Blanco brushes aside Jindal's complaints about her statements taking such swipes at him as saying she is running against both him and his benefactor, Foster, and her black radio ad that claims that Republicans don't want blacks to vote in large numbers.

"I don't whine about things," Blanco said. "This is a campaign. We are going to get our message out."

She knows women are coalescing around her, adding to the Acadiana base that put her into the runoff. Blanco has gone from being 14 points behind his 33 percent on Oct. 4 to a statistical tie now.

"Many women, especially older women, have said to me they are very happy that this opportunity exists. But I don't want to be just the first woman governor, but the best governor ever, because it's important that I succeed."

Not just for her, but for other women candidates.

Women are beaming as Blanco makes the rounds of the Terrebonne Courthouse in Houma under the spread of nearly 150-year-old, moss-draped live oaks.

Kim Marcell, 45, says she is definitely voting for Blanco. "She's done such a good job as lieutenant governor. This would be a great thing. It would be history."

Judy Brown, 50, says she would "just love it" for Louisiana to have a woman governor. "I think it is time for a woman to take that position. We can handle it."

Carol LeBlanc, 60, of nearby Lafourche Parish drove over from Raceland, about 45 minutes away, to see Blanco.

"It's a great new day in Louisiana," LeBlanc says about the reaction from women. "We are tickled pink."