Annapolis, Md. ? Kathleen Kennedy Townsend clambers over the front seat of the moving car into the back, where she starts counting bumper stickers out the window.

“There’s one. There’s another one.” As we pull up next to one driver, the candidate for governor of Maryland waves and asks if he’s coming to her rally. He waves back and says, “I’m going to my kid’s soccer game.”

That’s just as good. For the past three weeks, the schools, the playgrounds, the suburbs, nearly the whole region have been in sniper lockdown. But now the snipers are in custody. “What a relief. What an amazing relief,” says Townsend, who can feel people breathing again.

Yesterday the papers were still full of stories asking whether voters would dare go to the polls. Now there is some air for the campaign, as well as kids on the soccer field.

The eldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, Kathleen was born on the Fourth of July. She climbed the Matterhorn at 18 and Mount Rainier at 50, and after eight years as lieutenant governor, she is reaching for the top.

The polls have her in a dead heat 47 to 47 with Congressman Bob Ehrlich, a genial son of a car salesman who has the campaign appeal of a populist and a voting record that would please a plutocrat. Asked to choose two words to describe Ehrlich, she smiles wryly and picks the same two that her husband, David, chose earlier this afternoon: “frat boy.”

According to media wisdom, this campaign should have been a Townsend coronation. But her lead dissipated over the summer. She pulled even again after the debate in which Ehrlich not only repeatedly called her “ma’am” but seemed glib and condescending and not ready for prime time.

Then the snipers struck and an issue that Townsend feels passionately about gun control caught the attention of the public. Campaigning today at a candidates’ forum, an editorial board meeting and a union rally, Townsend talks only obliquely about how her family suffered from violence. But the memory of her father’s murder when she was 16 isn’t far from her restrained surface.

In the car, Townsend starts to repeat a story about a reporter who pressed her hard on whether she was “politicizing” gun control. Suddenly, angry all over again, she says passionately, “If there had been a law against Saturday night specials, my father would be alive today … and we would have had a much better world.”

In some role reversal of history, the “un-Kennedy” has the charisma in this race. The “Kennedy” is sometimes as serious in public as her 21-page platform and 32-page program. “I know,” she acknowledges, “I study. I prepare. I’m the classic woman, right?”

In that other role reversal of gender history, Ehrlich, the male candidate, has positioned himself as the outsider. He’s taken on the slogan that was once associated with women candidates: “It’s time for a change.” A subtext of this campaign is that the woman is the candidate of the Kennedy aristocracy, as well as the Maryland Democratic establishment.

But Kathleen would not only be the first woman governor of Maryland. She’d be the first woman in the Kennedy family to win public office on her own.

“When I was growing up, the expectations were that the men would run for office,” she says, reflecting back on her family as well as the times. She inherited the sense of duty and won the family nickname: the nun. She was raised for public service, but not public office.

The women’s movement, she says, “changed dreams.” But over the years, it was still the Kennedy men on magazine covers dubbed as heir to the family mantle. Or as bad boys. Meanwhile Kathleen, the eldest, the straight arrow, the wife of a college professor and mother of four daughters, was earning her own way up the system.

Ironically, her biggest political deficit now is the governor, whose popularity fell with budget woes and “Men Behaving Badly” troubles. In one year, Parris Glendening divorced his long-time wife, married his 35-year-old former deputy chief of staff and welcomed a new baby.

A campaign this close now comes down to getting out her vote, or “energizing the base” as they say in political lingo. The Townsend campaign is headed back to the bus where the candidate has had a dubious passion for singing camp songs.

Does energizing the base mean energizing the Kennedy in Kathleen Kennedy Townsend? “The voters in Maryland care about education, the environment, gun control, not my name.”

How many times has she been asked if she’s running on her name? She answers mischievously, “Kathleen means fat-cheeked Irish peasant. I don’t think anybody’s voting for that name.”

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.