By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

She is not just the Daughter now, but a mother as well.

Patricia White has amended another dimension to her political profile, adding to the traction she earned in a near-miss effort in the 2003 election, and to the advantage she started with as the daughter of a legendary former mayor.

With the birth of William Hagan Fine on July 21, his mother vaulted into the next phase of a political career that has already brought her from the non-profit hinterlands to major contender in 2003, but fewer than 900 votes shy of a City Council seat. She is, she says again and again, a different type of politician now.

"I'm as sandwiched as you get," shrugs White over iced coffee at Starbucks in West Roxbury, the coffeeshop of her choosing, a short walk from campaign headquarters.

"Sandwiched" in reference to the generation struggling to help their parents while raising children of their own. The big things changed quickly for White. With both her parents' health shaky - they were hospitalized separately in April - she married Isaac Fine in October, less than a year after her November 2003 disappointment, moved from Beacon Hill to Roslindale, learned in November that she was pregnant, rethought for three months her decision to run for council this year, and in February decided to launch a second campaign.

Now, she finds herself shuttling from headquarters to political events, home three or four days to check on the three-week-old baby, looked after by her husband's mother, and helps care for her parents. Her father, former Mayor Kevin White, suffers from advanced Alzheimer's disease.

"When I'm elected to the City Council," she says with confidence, "there'll be a whole other set of issues. How do I balance being a female city councillor with the needs of a growing family and my parents? I mean, I want several children."

White has zeroed in on the women's vote, deducing that Maura Hennigan's decision to leave her seat for a run at Mayor Menino has left Boston voters - whose four council votes sometimes veer to categories rather than specifics - with only one other woman on the ballot, frequent candidate Althea Garrison. Female voters, White says, "really want to hold onto a woman's seat." Her motherhood, she says, "makes me different than the other candidates."

"She'll need it," said one seasoned campaign veteran on another candidate's payroll, who asked that his name be withheld. "Or maybe she won't. Patricia's got the name, she's got a very high profile, and she avoids saying anything that could even remotely piss anybody off. Let's just say she's not costing herself any votes with bold stands."

Her campaign platform is still developing, White says, admitting that the issues stances she's posted on her web site (votepatriciawhite.com) are vague at best. She plans to release next week position papers on each neighborhood in the city, keying on five to 10 issues in each. "We'll weigh in on everything," she promises.

It's not just her pedigree that honed White's attunement to political planks. White's resume is rich with bullets of a public policy bent: most recently, director of a literacy program for area middle schools, and before that at Work Family Directions, a consulting firm aimed at employer-employee relations. She worked for the Heinz Foundation, the health and nutrition non-profit funded by the same fortune as Teresa Heinz's condiment inheritance.

White wants free pre-natal vitamins for women who can't afford them, and plans to work with major pharmacies to facilitate that. She supports neighborhood schools, but adds, "We need to have more equity across the system before we're there." She pledges to send her kids to Boston public schools through middle school, but adds, "I'm not going to make any commitment after that." She calls the ordinance that requires certain municipal workers to live within the city "probably the hardest issue of all the issues that the City Council has to weigh in on," and says she supports the residency requirement, but adds, "I take a position because I have to, but I really hear both sides of that."

White says she views a city councillor's primary role as helping the city balance between economic growth and quality of residential life. She refrains from pointing to specific perpetrators, but targets a bit of good-government scorn at the body as a whole.

"I think the council could work better as a whole. I think there's great division … You have these factions on the City Council, and that's incredibly unhealthy and unproductive …" White says. "It just makes the place less productive. There's a little too much palace intrigue for my liking."

But the individual councillors, she clarifies repeatedly, stand out. "I'm going to tell you they all have different strengths. I have actually thought about it, and they all have unique strengths."

White's cramped campaign office is attended Monday by four young campaign workers, each tasked to a different niche of the effort, three of them mesmerized by laptops. On the walls hang maps of the city's highest voting wards, and two blown-up old photographs are featured prominently. One is of the candidate's father, grinning with his palm to his forehead, obviously the butt of a joke at a long-ago St. Patrick's Day Breakfast. The other is of a young girl, beaming, at the dedication of the Patricia White Apartments, an elderly housing development in Brighton.

They represent the first bookend of her campaign profile, the one defined in part by her father. At a Florian Hall bingo game Monday afternoon, she encounters the political sweet spot where that dimension meets the other, as seniors greet her not just as the daughter but the mother as well, the other bookend, the one defined in part by her son.

"Did you see that?" she asks, having worked her way around four tables before the game begins. "Every single person I talked to asked me about either my father, or how I'm doing as a mother."