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Kathleen and Raymond recalled how they met while we sat at the family dining table in the Governor's Mansion. We ate flounder stuffed with shrimp, crabmeat and Italian seasonings, prepared by Raymond. He was swooning over the food while also keeping one eye on the television. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette -- where he had worked for 40 years -- was playing the University of North Texas.

"We had a party," Kathleen Blanco said, remembering the night they met. "Raymond started flirting with me."

"Get out of here!" her husband rejoined.

"I was 19," Blanco said.

While she was talking, Raymond used his mouth to pull a cork out of an already-opened wine bottle.

"I didn't think I'd get married the night we met," Blanco continued. "I never exclusively dated him. I figured dating was a time to be free, and marriage was a time to be loyal and serious."

"Shit, I was famous!" said her husband. "Everybody knew who I was!"

"He was the winning coach at Catholic High," she explained.

"Goddamn! Jesus Christ!" her husband shouted at the TV set as North Texas made a big gain. "What are we doing?"

"He started calling me," Blanco said, picking up the story. "We went out. But he was always late. We would agree to meet at 7 p.m. But he'd show up at 10 p.m. He had so many important things to do. I'd be mad at him. He'd cajole me. He'd say, 'C'mon, let's go!' He was a really interesting character. He had a big heart. He was everybody's caretaker. He was solving everybody's problems, and he created the kind of excitement that younger guys didn't create."

The relationship blossomed, and they became engaged. There was just one problem: Raymond, then defensive coordinator at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, didn't have the money to buy her a ring.

He did like to gamble. One night he stopped at the Tropicana, an illegal casino on Highway 90 between Lafayette and New Iberia. He had an extraordinary night at blackjack and remembers winning between $400 and $500. He bought Kathleen a diamond ring and they were married in 1964.

That same year, she became the first Babineaux to graduate from college. She started teaching at Breaux Bridge High School. But before the school year ended, she got pregnant and had to quit -- women who were showing could not teach. For the next 14 years, she emulated her mother: having six babies, cooking, cleaning the house, hauling kids around. Raymond Blanco provided little assistance. By then, he had left coaching to be first the dean of men and later the dean of student affairs at the university. At night, he'd visit dorm rooms to help students with their studies or any personal problems.

In 1979, in need of money and more adult conversation, she took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau after scoring highest among the applicants. Her husband bemoaned her not continuing as a full-time mom, but her kids were thrilled: More money meant they could replace their worn-out tennis shoes. The Census job was only a one-year deal. Afterward, she resolved to keep working. She and Raymond formed a polling company.

Growing up, Kathleen Blanco was not a class president or even class secretary. In fact, she had developed a distaste for politics. When she was a teenager, her father twice ran for local offices and lost each race. The first time in her life that she would show any interest in politics came as a college student, when she began reading about education and health care issues being debated in the state Legislature.

Raymond Blanco, however, lived and breathed political campaigns and gamesmanship. Local candidates would hire him as an adviser, and he dispensed political commentary on Lafayette news broadcasts. Slowly, the political bug began to bite Kathleen, as well. In 1971, she volunteered for J. Bennett Johnston when he ran for governor against Edwin Edwards and narrowly lost. She also volunteered for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1976.

In 1983, J. Luke LeBlanc surrendered his seat in the state House to care for his cancer-stricken wife. Blanco felt emboldened enough to run for the seat but was given little chance of replacing him. She knocked on all the doors of the district, however, and defeated the wife of one of Lafayette's richest men.

In 1987, LeBlanc sought his old job. His wife had recovered, and he missed politics. An old-style populist, LeBlanc ranted and railed against Blanco at every opportunity, twisting her voting record in hopes that she would lose her cool and sully her spotless image. Blanco did blow up at one forum. "Jesus Christ, mom went crazy!" her 15-year-old son Ray reported to his father and siblings afterward.

Despite that event, Luke LeBlanc proved to be no match for Blanco. "He got beat 60-40," said J. Luke LeBlanc's son, Jerry. He told me this in his seventh-floor office -- the one with "Commissioner of Administration" on the door -- overlooking the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. Appointed by Blanco to the most senior position in government, LeBlanc ruefully remembered that he managed his father's campaign. But he went on to tell another story.

After Blanco was elected to the Public Service Commission in 1988, LeBlanc ran for and won her open seat, the one his father had previously occupied. No one would confuse LeBlanc with his father. Jerry LeBlanc was buttoned down and pro-business. The day after LeBlanc won, the Blancos visited his home. "She handed me the District 45 license plate," LeBlanc remembered, "as a gesture of transferring the torch. That was the beginning of their saying, 'We're all going to move forward. The past is the past. We won't hold grudges.'"

AFTER BLANCO turned 40, the political doors opened for her, each one presenting a broader horizon, beginning with the Public Service Commission. She did drop out of the 1991 governor's contest, but she learned a valuable lesson: that she could never again run an under-financed race. In 1994, she was re-elected to the PSC, and in 1995, she was elected as lieutenant governor. In 1999, she was re-elected with 80 percent of the vote and set her sights on the Governor's Mansion. She ran as a problem solver who had already brought the state 21,000 tourism jobs and millions of dollars in investment.

Blanco finished second in the primary. Three days before the runoff election, she was trailing the front-runner, 32-year-old Republican whiz kid Bobby Jindal, when they met for a final debate. More polished and quick on his feet, Jindal seemed to have strengthened his standing that night. Then the two candidates were asked to name a defining moment in their lives. Jindal stayed on message, discussing his conversion to Christianity and the birth of his daughter.

Blanco immediately knew she would have to address her rawest moment. Listening to Jindal speak, she says, she tried to summon a less painful memory, but she could not avoid it. "The most defining moment came when I lost a child," she told the statewide television audience.

Blanco's 19-year-old son, Ben, the baby of the brood, was killed instantly in 1997 when an industrial crane fell on him near Morgan City. Ben was cutting up scrap metal over the Christmas holidays to earn a few extra dollars. The accident traumatized her son Ray, who was standing alongside his baby brother. Her husband particularly felt guilty because Ben took the job after Raymond Blanco dissuaded him from going skiing. Afterward, when Raymond Blanco crossed Johnston Street on the way to his university office, he contemplated walking into traffic and making it look like an accident.

"It's very hard for me to talk about it," Kathleen Blanco said as the debate wound up, looking into the camera and fighting tears. "I guess that's what makes me who I am today -- knowing that one of the worst things that can happen to a person happened to me, and we were able to protect our family, and the rest of my children have been strong as a result of it."

I asked her about the debate one day as we rode from Lafayette to New Iberia. "When I left the gubernatorial forum, I was totally exhausted," Blanco told me. "I had to dig deep to talk about the death of my child. When people lose children, it's easy for families to fall apart. I was determined during the grieving process to hold us together. It was like we were hanging on for dear life for a long time. You had to hang on to your faith. There's a greater purpose in life. There are no positives in losing a child, only negatives."

They buried Ben in Lafayette after a massive funeral Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Church. Blanco surprised everyone by getting up and giving a brief eulogy to her son. "At the funeral, people just kept coming and coming and coming," Blanco told me as we entered New Iberia's city limits. "You're so numb. You can't think about what was going on around you. I was not planning to get up and speak. I just had an absolute need to tell my child goodbye. I knew all the things I had to say. I had to make my personal goodbye."

We were sitting in the back of a State Police SUV. I was looking down taking notes when I noticed she had stopped talking. I looked up at her. "His body was crushed," she said, looking straight ahead. "They couldn't open the coffin." Tears began rolling down her cheeks.

Commentators said her heart-felt response during the debate may have spelled the difference with voters. She overcame Jindal, defeating him 52 percent to 48 percent.

IN HER FIRST official act as governor, Kathleen Blanco made Martin Luther King's birthday a state holiday. In doing so, she offered a symbolic rebuke of Mike Foster's first official act as governor in 1996, in which he abolished affirmative action in the awarding of state contracts.

In her first year, Blanco has won high marks for forcing Saints owner Tom Benson to withdraw his demand that the state build him a new stadium and for challenging his back-up demand, that the state continue paying him more than $25 million a year to stay in New Orleans and pay more than $150 million to renovate the Superdome. She got the Legislature to phase out two business taxes, to revamp the Louisiana Tax Commission to create fairer property tax assessments, and to ban fund-raising during legislative sessions. She maintained the Foster administration's historically elevated funding for pre-kindergarten and higher education.

"Her first session agenda was not sweeping, but she got most of what she wanted," Wayne Parent told me. "She's concerned about health care, cleaning up Louisiana and getting businesses to invest. She's going to take small steps, but she will get it done."

Veteran political commentator John Maginnis offered a less complimentary view. "She presented a very modest legislative agenda," Maginnis wrote in his syndicated weekly column, "more suitable for a do-nothing election year than for an administration taking its first crack at changing Louisiana."

Blanco has a ready answer for such criticism. "I have an ambitious agenda," she said. "But you have to have money to pay for it." Blanco needs another $80 million per year to make pre-kindergarten available to all four-year-olds, and she wants another $220 million a year to raise teacher salaries to the Southern average, a goal that eluded Foster. Meanwhile, she is facing a potentially devastating loss of $400 million next year from the federal government to provide health care for the poor.

"It's so frustrating," she said. "I'm trying to stop the bleeding. We lost the oil industry, everybody's now in Houston. New Orleans has little or no corporate presence. I'm determined to recapture what we lost. I'm trying to create an economy that generates the tax dollars to get us past the crisis that we have year after year. One option is to start passing taxes. Who in the heck wants to accomplish that?"

Accomplishing any part of her agenda, of course, takes political skill. But because Blanco talks political shop and gossip less than just about any Louisiana politician I've met, you could almost forget that she is politically shrewd -- that is, until you see her in action in Abbeville, where she flew by helicopter to endorse state Sen. Willie Mount in her race for Congress.

Republicans were attacking Mount, a Democrat, because as mayor of Lake Charles she had gotten public approval for higher taxes to raise salaries of police and firemen. Earlier this year in the Legislature, Mount had also supported Blanco's five-year renewal of the suspension of the sales tax exemption for utilities.

"Are you a tax and spend liberal?" Blanco jokingly asked, referring to the tried-and-true Republican campaign strategy.

"Yeah, look at me!" Mount replied with a sarcastic laugh.

"I just think you call them liars, period," Blanco offered.

Referring to Mount's vote on the sales tax renewal, Blanco then said, "You say you voted to pay school teachers."

"Yes," Mount replied, "I provided more basic services."

"Don't say 'basic services,'" Blanco counseled. "Use specific words. Tell them that you invested in your city."

"Yes," Mount said, picking up on Blanco's suggestions, "I can say we balanced the budget every year and had a surplus."

Blanco has already raised more than $1 million for a likely re-election bid in 2007. She could be a formidable opponent. As an abortion opponent who is handy with a fishing rod and a gun, Blanco appeals to rural conservatives. Her support for education and health care appeals to liberals. Her business tax cuts appeal to industry leaders. But can she pull off her agenda?

Blanco's strategy centers on her belief that if she governs both honestly and effectively, Louisianans will regain confidence in their state. College graduates will remain at home and business executives will want to expand their operations here. Blanco ruled out raising sales and income taxes. But while she didn't say it explicitly, she indicated that, if she remains popular, she would likely seek increases of taxes on liquor and cigarettes and fees paid by the trucking and hospital industries. Those increases, however, would raise only a fraction of the money she needs. She also believes she can achieve something that escaped Foster: getting non-Louisiana companies to set up shop here.

Minutes after we had taken off for Ruston, on our first day together, she told me one of her favorite stories. It involved a Chicago-based company, Union Tank Car. Company executives wanted to build a $100 million plant earlier this year that would create 850 jobs and manufacture up to 14 railroad tank cars a day. Louisiana was a finalist until a company official wrote Blanco saying that they were entering into 30-day exclusive negotiations with Texas. "That usually means the ballgame is over," Blanco said. "That was upsetting."

But when the 30-day period ended with no announcement of a deal between Texas and Union Tank Car, she called the company's chief executive officer. "We're ready to talk," she said. The company decided to build its plant in Alexandria. The deal will be costly to the state. Blanco agreed to provide $62 million in subsidies to Union Tank Car over 10 years. Nonetheless, it represented a major victory for her. "Not since 1981, when the state landed the since departed Boeing facility in Lake Charles," political reporter John Hill wrote later, "has the state had such a big announcement."

THE UNION TANK CAR story had a starring role at the dinner in San Antonio. "Blanco never took no for an answer," Bob Zwartz, a senior executive with the company, told the gathering. "Louisiana is open for business."

The business site locators also heard from Candace Butler, a General Motors executive. She explained why her company decided in October to assemble the Hummer H3, the auto giant's new sport utility vehicle, at its Shreveport truck factory. "We're proud to be in Louisiana. It's a doggone good state."

These were positive developments, of course. But could Blanco create enough jobs to fund her agenda? After returning from Texas, I drove to Louisiana State University to ask Jim Richardson, the state's leading economist. After all, raising teacher salaries and fully funding pre-kindergarten alone would cost an additional $300 million a year.

Richardson's figures were not reassuring. He said that during Foster's term in the 1990s, Louisiana created about 33,500 jobs a year, "or not enough growth to keep pace with job creation in more dynamic Southern states like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina." During the economic slowdown of President George W. Bush's first two years, 2001-02, Louisiana lost 10,000 jobs per year. In 2003-04, Louisiana will add about 7,000 new jobs a year, or not enough to offset the job loss during Bush's first two years. Richardson is projecting that Louisiana will create 18,000 jobs in 2005 and 22,000 in 2006.

Would that provide the tax revenue Blanco needs? In a back-of-the-envelope-style analysis, Richardson determined that every new $40,000-a-year job would produce an additional $3,000 a year in income, sales and excise taxes for state coffers. He pulled out a hand calculator. Creating 18,000 jobs would yield only $54 million a year in additional tax revenue, 22,000 jobs would yield only $66 million. "There will be a series of years where fiscal decisions will be tough," Richardson concluded. Under this analysis, in other words, Blanco could have enough new money to improve the state only on the margins.

Louisiana is lagging in job growth particularly because of the well-publicized problem in metro New Orleans: white collar and manufacturing jobs are disappearing at a faster rate than tourism jobs are replacing them. "If this parish dies, the state dies," state Sen. John Hainkel told me in his downtown New Orleans law office. "And this parish is dying. We're losing too many good jobs and not educating enough people. Did you read the Picayune this morning?" He was referring to a news story that reported many New Orleans public schools did not have a single student qualify for the TOPS state scholarship program. "If you have a graduating class without a 20 on the ACT, you're in deep shit. What are we going to do? That's what scares me."

Hainkel pointed to one area that could help solve the problem: There are 7,000 unfilled jobs at metro New Orleans hospitals. "It's unbelievable," he said. "If I'm the governor, that's the first thing I do. That's low-hanging fruit." But if filling those jobs was low-hanging fruit, those openings wouldn't exist. Apparently, not enough New Orleans-area workers are drug-free, have no prohibitive criminal record and have the proper schooling to get these jobs.

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