Kathy G. Lubbers says it hasn’t been difficult finding her place in the world — a world in which everyone points her out as the daughter of Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House speaker now fighting it out for the Republican presidential nomination.

“It hasn’t been so difficult as some might think,” Lubbers, 48, says. “It would have been much more difficult if I was a son. … I don’t have to walk in his footsteps like, maybe, a son might think he would need to. I don’t have to compete with my father. I don’t have to live up to what he’s done.”

She has come to be an indispensable piece in her father’s political and promotional machinery. Gingrich’s elder daughter, Lubbers is also the senior adviser of her father’s presidential campaign.

She was at his side on Friday during a news conference at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa. Unlike the rest of the campaign staff, Lubbers did not have to get on a flight to come to South Florida. She is a resident of Key Biscayne, where for 12 years she has shared a condominium with her husband, Paul Lubbers, and their Boston terrier, Flint.

In the last few days, Lubbers and her sister, Jackie Cushman, an author who lives in Atlanta, have publicly defended Gingrich from the statements of his second wife, Marianne Ginther, who alleges that he asked her for “an open marriage” after having an affair for six years with an aide who is now his third wife, Callista Bisek.

“It’s important for people to hear that it is not true,” Lubbers says. “When you hear it from his daughters, who should know, it’s very believable.”

Lubbers usually stays out of the public arena. She prefers keeping a low profile, going fishing when she is not campaigning or doing volunteer work as a national board member of the Atlanta-based Arthritis Foundation. She suffers from rheumatoid arthritis since she was 23.

She and Cushman, 45, are the daughters of Gingrich’s first marriage with Jackie Battley. Gingrich, 68, didn’t have other children with his next wives.

Gingrich and Battley met when the future congressman was studying at Emory University in Atlanta. Lubbers was born when he was 20 years old.

The girls grew up in Carrollton, Ga., as Baptists. They moved to Washington, D.C., in 1979, when Gingrich was elected to the U.S. House from Georgia. Lubbers was 15 and she worked as a volunteer in his campaign, giving her first news interview.

“I asked him what his advice was and he said before he speaks to a large crowd or at important events he always takes a moment to pray,” Lubbers says. “It demonstrates both his faith and his guidance to me as his daughter.”

Two years later, her parents divorced. That separation has also been used by Gingrich’s adversaries, who remind the public that he served divorce documents to Battley in 1980 while she was hospitalized successfully fighting cancer.

In response, Cushman wrote a column clarifying that her parents were already in the process of divorcing, at her mother’s request. Battley, now 75, lives outside Atlanta.

“Unfortunately, we know that over half of marriages in America end in divorce,” Lubbers says. “You are not going to unlove a parent and you have to have an open heart to forgive them and understand that they are people too.”

Lubbers studied religion at Davidson College in North Carolina. After graduating, she married Paul and opened a small coffee roasting plant in Greensboro, N.C., where he obtained his PhD in Coaching and Pedagogy. In 1999, Paul was hired by the United States Tennis Association, which has its training center in Key Biscayne.

In 2000, Lubbers began to work with her father as president of Gingrich Communications, a marketing and public relations firm that promotes Gingrich’s conservative ideology.

The company produces books authored by Gingrich, his television and radio presentations, as well as websites such as theamericano.com.

Lubbers resigned last year to devote herself full time to the campaign. She also owns a boutique talent management agency in Key Biscayne.

A long time ago, Lubbers accepted that she cannot escape her father’s shadow.

For their honeymoon in 1988, the Lubberses traveled to Alaska, close to the North Pole. At the hotel, there was a clock radio that awakened them in the morning.

“The alarm went off in the bedroom and it’s my father’s voice on the radio,” Lubbers recalls. “Oh my God, I went as far away as I could go and there he is.”