First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
The Democrat: New York's
U.S. Senate Race

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the nation's first First Lady to seek elected office, needed no introduction to most New Yorkers. Most already knew her as the woman who withstood her husband's infidelity, endured his impeachment and survived an investigation into her Arkansas law practice. Like most Americans, New Yorkers were familiar with the steely 53-year-old blonde who wrote a best-selling book on child-rearing and early in her husband's first term, spearheaded a failed effort on national health care reform.

But fewer perhaps knew the woman who grew up in suburban Chicago a staunch Methodist Republican. As student at Wellesley College, she was elected president of the college's Young Republicans in her freshman year and president of the student government in the turbulent year of 1968. It was at Wellesley that Hillary Rodham became interested in the civil rights movement, feminism, and the plight of the urban poor. She shed her Republican affiliations and became an outspoken but pragmatic voice for the emerging left.

Later, she attended Yale Law School, where she met Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman became a mentor and helped cement Hillary Rodham's interest in the welfare of children. It was also at Yale that she met a dashing young classmate named Bill Clinton. They dated steadily through law school and Hillary Rodham's work at the Yale Child Study Center and as a staff attorney at the Children's Defense Fund.

After Clinton graduated, Hillary moved with him to Arkansas where he was teaching law at the state university. In 1975, the two were married in their Fayetteville living room. Then Clinton was elected state Attorney General, and the couple moved to Little Rock. Hillary joined the prestigious Rose law firm, while her husband prepared to run for governor. In 1980, their daughter Chelsea was born.

As the First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Rodham chaired the state's Education Standards Committee and launched an energetic four-year campaign to reform the state's deeply troubled public schools. She lobbied for teacher testing, smaller class sizes, a longer school year and tougher graduation standards. She pushed her ambitious plan through the state legislature, doubling teacher salaries and tripling state education spending. Student test scores went up, and Arkansas' schools became a model for change.

But her success was tempered by a number of private business failures, including a land development venture known as Whitewater, whose implications of improper business dealings would come back to haunt her years later.

Though an extravagant public investigation dragged on for years, and implicated the Clinton's friends and associates, no charges were ever filed against Mrs. Clinton. But among people who were already put off by her aggressive personality, the Whitewater scandal cemented their dislike.

In December, Mrs. Clinton announced her plans to run for the Senate and bought a big white house in Chappaqua, New York. She moved in in February, without her husband, and became an official resident of the Empire State.

Since the Senate race began, debates over Mrs. Clinton's personality have often eclipsed discussion of her policy proposals. Instead she has been forced to battle the perception among some voters that she is cold, ambitious and scheming. Some have even faulted her for not divorcing her husband. But throughout the campaign, she has maintained that her marriage is a private matter and that her personal decisions should not become a campaign issue.