Profile: Hillary Rodham Clinton

— -- Thanks to her overlapping roles as first lady, informal political adviser to President Bill Clinton, health-care reform advocate, and now Senate candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton has become a symbol of the Democratic Party in the last decade — and a prime target for Republican attacks during that time.

Mrs. Clinton has brought a new level of political engagement to the role of first lady, describing her involvement as an attempt to practice a “politics of meaning.” As a result, she has been closely identified with the successes and failures of the Clinton administration.

She served as a central, if unofficial, adviser to winning presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, but as the head of the president’s health-care task force, took the brunt of the blame when the administration’s health-care reform legislation died on Capitol Hill in 1994.

Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy for New York’s open Senate seat has only brightened the spotlight on her, since it is the first time a first lady has run for elected office. Indeed, the New York Senate race is the most closely-watched congressional campaign of the 2000 election.

Republican Childhood

Hillary Diane Rodham was born in Chicago in 1947, into a family of Republicans. She attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, becoming a Democrat in the process, and then attended Yale Law School, where she met her future husband.

The story has it that Hillary caught Bill Clinton staring at her, and approached him to say that anyone looking that hard should know her name — leaving him at a rare loss for words.

The Clintons were married in 1975, by which time Hillary had already served on the legal staff for the House Judiciary Committee, when it was investigating President Richard Nixon and the unfolding Watergate scandal.

The Arkansas YearsThe couple moved to Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, where he was elected governor in 1978. After losing his re-election bid, Clinton regained the office and held it until 1992, when he defeated Republican incumbent George Bush in the presidential election.