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.

Hillary Clinton moved into the private sector, becoming a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, and worked extensively as an activist for children’s rights, most notably as a board member of the Children’s Defense Fund.

In 1980, Hillary gave birth to their only child, Chelsea, who is planning to take time off from her final year of college, at Stanford, in part to spent time with her mother’s Senate campaign.

Unexpected Scrutiny

Soon after the beginning of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton also found herself confronted with a degree of scutiny into her private life few could have anticipated — and which has never really let up since.

At times, Mrs. Clinton has dealt assertively with these matters. The Clintons appeared together on national TV in January 1992 to vouch for the health of their marriage. In January 1998, Mrs. Clinton made a televised appearance in which she notoriously blamed initial reports about her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky on “a vast, right-wing conspiracy.”

In between, she was summoned to testify before a grand jury in January 1996, by then-Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, during his lengthy investigation of the Whitewater land deal the Clintons had made in Arkansas in 1978.

For the most part, such experiences have not led Mrs. Clinton to back away from public life. Although she took a less central role in political matters after the failure of the health-care initiative in 1994, Mrs. Clinton remained a highly visible public figure, delivering the keynote address at the United Nations International Conference on Women near Beijing, China, in 1995, and publishing a book, It Takes A Village, in 1996.

From the White House To Capitol Hill?

In July 1999, after numerous Democrats suggested she should run for the seat being vacated by New York’s venerable Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Mrs. Clinton announced she would begin a “listening tour” of the state.

In November, the Clintons purchased a home in suburban Chappaqua, and in February of 2000, Hillary officially declared her candidacy.

Although often described as a liberal, Mrs. Clinton has adopted a number of the same generally centrist policies — fiscal discipline, business incentives, and even support of the death penalty — that helped her husand win two presidential elections after the Democrats lost three in the 1980s.

She continues to push for changes in the health-care system, but often says, “I now come from the school of smaller steps.”

Initially running against New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Mrs. Clinton quickly became part of an intense, spirited campaign, with both sides raising unprecedented amounts of money. But when Giuliani suddenly departed from the race in May, beset by cancer and marital problems, Hillary found herself running against a lesser-known opponent, congressman Rick Lazio of Long Island.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Clinton has seen the Senate race remained deadlocked, with Lazio now raising millions from contributors both in New York and across the country, a significant portion of which appears to be coming from dedicated political opponents of the Clintons.

One fund-raising letter sent out on Lazio’s behalf calls Mrs. Clinton a woman running due to “blind political ambition,” and some Republicans seem to view the New York Senate race as a referendum on the Clintons.

“It’s almost as if they’ve got one last chance to beat me,” President Clinton has remarked.

Which means that, once again, Mrs. Clinton is finding that being a politically engaged first lady carries with it both rewards and drawbacks.