Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D) Elected 2000, 1st term up 2006
Born:	Oct. 26, 1947, Chicago, IL
Home:	Chappaqua
Education:	Wellesley Col., B.A. 1969; Yale U., J.D. 1973
Religion:	Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Bill)
Professional Career:	Atty., Children's Defense Fund, 1973-74; Council, U.S. House of Reps. Judiciary Committee, 1974; Asst. professor, U. of AR School of Law, 1974-77, 1979-80; Practicing atty., 1977-92; Chair, Pres. Task Force on Health Care Reform, 1993.
Additional Info
Recent Articles · Offices · Committees · Ratings · Key Votes · Election Results
More On New York
At A Glance · State Profile Senior Senator · Almanac Home

Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, was elected junior Senator from New York in November 2000. Clinton grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois; her father owned and ran a drape and curtain factory. She excelled at her studies and was elected to student government at Maine South High School. Park Ridge is a solidly Republican Chicago suburb, near O'Hare Airport, and the young Hillary Rodham was a Goldwater girl in 1964. She went to Wellesley College, where she became a Democrat in the turbulent election year of 1968: she wrote her senior thesis (kept under lock and key by the college since 1993) on applying the theories of radical Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky and argued that antipoverty programs did not give enough power to the poor. She was elected student government president, and pushed successfully for admission of more black students and admission of men to women's dorms. At the 1969 commencement she gave a speech that won notice in Life magazine. She went on to Yale Law School, where she worked with the attorney for Black Panthers accused of murder and clerked for a summer with Communist attorney Robert Treuhaft in Berkeley. At Yale she met Bill Clinton, and they became partners for life.

Bill Clinton was anything but reticent about his political ambitions in his native Arkansas. He showed her around the state and together they went to Austin in 1972 to run the McGovern campaign in Texas. After graduation in 1973, Bill Clinton moved to Fayetteville to teach law at the University of Arkansas. In 1974 Hillary Rodham moved to Washington to work for the House Judiciary Committee's special counsel John Doar on the impeachment of Richard Nixon; After Nixon resigned, she returned to Arkansas to teach law, and in October 1975 she and Clinton were married. In 1976 he was elected attorney general of Arkansas; she worked for Jimmy Carter's campaign. After that she worked for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and in 1977 was appointed to part-time chairman of the Legal Services Corporation. Under her leadership, the Legal Services budget increased dramatically, including contributions to local political campaigns and conducting campaigns against ballot propositions. In 1978 Bill Clinton ran for governor, and after he won the Democratic nomination, tantamount to victory that year, Hillary Rodham invested $1,000 in commodities future and with the help of a friend who was general counsel of Tyson Foods, one of the state's biggest businesses, saw that turned into $100,000.

In 1980 Bill Clinton was defeated for re-election. He promptly took up a more moderate line and his wife began to call herself Hillary Clinton; in 1982 he beat the incumbent and became governor again. Hillary Clinton continued her law practice and service on the board of the Children's Defense Fund and other organizations. She served on the boards of Wal-Mart, TCBY and in 1988 and 1991 was named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country. It was in these years also that she and her husband invested in the Whitewater real estate project and that she performed legal work for the Morgan Guaranty Savings and Loan, which invested in the project and whose failure cost the federal government $73 million. Whitewater later became the subject of congressional hearings and an independent counsel investigation, both of which were impeded when Rose Law Firm billing records were subpoenaed in July 1994 but were not found until they turned up in the residential quarters of the White House in January 1996. Independent Counsel Robert Ray in September 2000 ended the investigation, saying he could not prove that the Clintons had been involved in criminal activity or that they concealed information from investigators or obstructed justice. In his final report in March 2002 Ray noted that Rose Law Firm records were found in the family quarters of the White House in January 1996 and that three witnesses told investigators they saw her "carrying records that had the appearance of the billing records in July 1995"; but he said that that evidence was insufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

In 1991 Bill Clinton ran for president. It was widely rumored that he had had many extramarital affairs; at a Washington press breakfast the Clintons admitted that their marriage had not been without problems. After the election, Clinton announced that the leader of his task force on health care reform would be the first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton--the first time her maiden name was featured. The task force under her direction and that of Ira Magaziner met secretly and without input from members of Congress; a complicated plan was finally produced after a couple of deadlines were not met. Clinton eventually did testify before Congress; there and in other public forums she was crisp, articulate, knowledgeable. But she was unable to persuade Congress to adopt her plan. It never came to the floor in either house, and was abandoned in September 1994. In the meantime, the first lady had problems with scandals. In May 1993 the members of the White House Travel Office were fired, and director Billy Ray Dale was later prosecuted--and acquitted by a jury within minutes. Clinton denied that she had any role in the firings, or in apparent plans to replace the charter service with one owned by Clinton friends and Hollywood producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. In June 2000 Independent Counsel Robert Ray concluded that Clinton had given "factually false" testimony in a sworn deposition, but declined to prosecute her.

Clinton persevered through the humiliations of the health care fiasco and the scandals with an aplomb that showed great discipline and determination. She wrote It Takes a Village and donated the proceeds to children's hospitals. In January 1998, when Bill Clinton denied the charge that he had had an affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton flew to New York to appear on the Today show and charge that the allegations were the product of "a vast right-wing conspiracy." She continued to support him, though with obvious frostiness, when he was forced to admit in August 1998 that the charges were true.

Meanwhile, she campaigned gamely for Democratic candidates in the 1998 elections, and was particularly moved by the warm applause she received in her four appearances in New York for Senate candidate Charles Schumer. Three days after the 1998 election, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced that he would not run for re-election in New York in 2000. Moynihan, the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson, a man whose public career extended back into the 1950s and included many prescient warnings and original insights, who had served four terms in the Senate after serving in the cabinet or sub-cabinets of four successive presidents, obviously was not going to be replaced by a politician of similar magnitude; there aren't any. But there also weren't any obvious Democratic successors in New York. Moynihan, who passed away in March 2003, himself suggested state comptroller Carl McCall; Congresswoman Nita Lowey of Westchester County was interested in the race, though it was not clear that either had the stature to beat the likely Republican nominee, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In early 1999 Bob Torricelli, the aggressive head of the Senate Democrats' campaign committee, called for Clinton to run. She said she was giving "careful thought" to it. She started making more trips to New York, and Lowey said she would be glad to step aside if Clinton ran. In July 1999 she appeared at Moynihans' Upstate farm and then began a "listening tour" across Upstate New York. Giuliani responded with an appearance in Arkansas.

Clinton's early campaign was not without troubles. There was widespread ridicule of the idea of someone with no previous connection with the state running for senator from New York. In August 1999 Bill Clinton granted clemency to four Puerto Rican terrorists who never expressed remorse for their violent crimes--an obvious pitch for the Puerto Rican vote. Embarrassed, she came out against the move, without giving a heads-up to Puerto Rican leaders. That same month the Clintons left their favorite vacation spot, fashionable Martha's Vineyard, for a sojourn in Skaneateles, a pleasant town in the Finger Lakes they would never have visited otherwise. In October the Clintons bought a house in woodsy Chappaqua in Westchester County and were then embarrassed because they borrowed most of the purchase price from Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe; later they got more conventional financing. In November 1999 on a trip to Israel, Clinton embraced and kissed the wife of Yasir Arafat after a speech in which she lambasted the Israelis; Clinton explained later that she was acting in a diplomatic capacity, but her act brought back memories of her endorsement of an independent Palestinian state when that was not yet U.S. policy. In February 2000 she formally announced her candidacy, with her husband standing silently by, from a venue in Westchester. By that point her poll ratings had slipped, and she was running no better than even with Giuliani.

Carpetbagging is not necessarily a political crime in New York. Voters there in 1964 elected Robert Kennedy, though he lived in Virginia and had a technical residence in Massachusetts. Robert Kennedy won in 1964 not just because of Lyndon Johnson's coattails, but because he ran virtually even in usually Republican Upstate New York; national celebrities may be commonplace in New York City, but when they show up in Upstate towns and cities it is noted and appreciated. Hillary Rodham Clinton's strategy was similar. With her usual hard work, perseverance and intensity, she criss-crossed Upstate New York, listened to its voters' many complaints, learned about local issues and adopted appealing positions on them: the same slogging persistence she had shown in the dreary days in Arkansas and the tumultuous days after the failed health care initiative and scandal charges in Washington. And she waited for the opposition to make mistakes, which it did. In March 2000 Giuliani was under attack when police officers shot an unarmed man in Manhattan; the liberal New York press seized on this opportunity, and the mayor helped them by releasing the victim's juvenile crime record. In April Giuliani announced that he had prostate cancer; in May he announced that he was seeking a separation from his wife. Days later, in a dramatic press conference, he announced he was leaving the Senate race.

Within 24 hours the Republicans had another candidate, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio. He had talked of running in summer 1999, until Governor George Pataki announced suddenly in August that he was backing his longtime rival Giuliani. Lazio had a moderate voting record in the House; like Giuliani he backed abortion rights. He raised plenty of money: Hillary haters from all over the country sent in contributions large and small, and he ended up spending $40 million. But his campaign was less than perfect. Lazio was vulnerable to attacks, made often by Clinton, that he had supported Newt Gingrich, a bete noire to most New York voters. And there were unforced errors. In the first debate on September 13, Lazio walked over to Clinton and presented her a paper with a pledge to eschew soft money ads. In a time when voters were eager for consensus, Lazio was providing them with confrontation, and this in-your-face behavior was especially repugnant to women. Nine days later they both agreed to not run ads financed by soft money, that is, contributions to parties; but this was unenforceable, since parties and others can spend what they want to, and the assumption that campaign finance was a vote-moving issue proved ill-founded. In the second debate, Lazio declined to say that he would vote for any Supreme Court nominee who opposed the key abortion rights decision of Roe v. Wade, a defensible position intellectually, but one difficult to sustain politically in New York; Clinton pounded him on it.

For a race that was close almost all the way in the polls, this Senate election--surpassing the 1998 New York Senate race as the most expensive in history not involving a self-financing candidate--was decided by a surprisingly wide margin. Clinton won 55%-43%, almost the same as Schumer's 55%-44% two years earlier. "Sixty-two counties, 16 months, three debates, two opponents and six black pantsuits later--here we are!" exulted Clinton on election night. She was helped, of course, by the fact that Al Gore was carrying New York 60%-35%. But she ran well on her own. She carried New York City by 74%-25%, the same margin as Schumer's in 1998. She trailed in the suburbs by only 53%-45%, despite Lazio's suburban provenance; he carried his Long Island base, but she carried her now native Westchester. And Lazio won Upstate by only 50%-47%; Clinton carried most of the large counties there, and her percentages in county after county, not usually 50% but seldom under 40%, are impressive evidence of her hard work in campaigning and mastering Upstate issues. Clinton carried the Jewish vote, according to the VNS exit poll, by only 53%-45%, which would usually mean disaster for a Democrat in New York, and she did far less well than Schumer and other Democrats among those with graduate degrees, a large percentage of whom are Jewish. But she carried Upstate women by 55%-43%, an excellent showing for a Democrat: the work paid off.

A few days after the election, Clinton took a victory lap around Upstate New York and had a harmonious meeting in Albany with Pataki. But her standing fell in the months after the election. In December 2000 she signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster for $8 million--$4.5 million more than the book contract for which Newt Gingrich was so roundly attacked in 1995. In departing the White House, the Clintons took $190,000 in gifts--far above the Senate's $50 limit--and many had to be returned when it was revealed that they included items donated to the White House, not the Clintons. Among the gifts were $7,375 worth of coffee tables and chairs donated by Denise Rich, former wife and advocate of Marc Rich, the fugitive financier pardoned by Bill Clinton on his last day in office, despite the opposition of New York U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White. Hillary Rodham Clinton said she had no opinion on the pardon. Nor, she said, did she have any role in the pardon of four Hasidic Jews from the Rockland County community of New Square who were convicted of fleecing the federal government of millions of dollars--a pardon White also opposed. But Clinton had visited New Square in August 2000, had won the community's vote by a margin of 1,400 to 12 and had been present at a White House Map Room meeting between their leaders and Bill Clinton on December 21, 2000, where they asked for the pardons. She said she had no knowledge as well that her brother Hugh Rodham had, while living at the White House, pushed for and obtained the pardon of two other felons for which he had been paid $400,000.

Many expected that Clinton would be greeted grudgingly and suspiciously by other senators because of her obvious presidential ambitions. On at least one occasion she slipped; at the National Press Club in July 2001, when asked if she would run for president, she said, "No, I have said that I am not running and I'm having a great time being presi--being a first-term senator." In fact she has worked hard at the often tedious business of being a senator. She continued to travel around New York, especially Upstate: by June 2002 she had made 130 (!) trips to Upstate New York. She worked on federal loans for the Mohawk Valley, a theater restoration in Gloversville, the arcana of dairy price supports. She turned down many opportunities for national appearances; only after September 11 did she appear again on Meet the Press, in December 2001. She worked hard in the Senate, attending just about every committee and subcommittee hearing, spending time on the floor, approaching Republican colleagues to ask if she could co-sponsor their bills. At Democratic caucus meetings, she would get coffee for other senators. Republicans found themselves sheepishly admitting they like her. At the same time, by all accounts she has taken a hard partisan line behind closed doors. She advised Tom Daschle that Senate Democrats should have a war room, as the Clinton campaign and White House did. She supported George W. Bush in the war on terrorism and voted for the Iraq war resolution, and told him in their meeting on September 13, 2001, that she was one of the few who understood the loneliness of the White House, but she advised down-the-line opposition to his domestic policies. Occasionally in public she sounded a partisan note. In May 2001 she cast the single vote against the confirmation of Michael Chertoff, who had worked on the Whitewater independent counsel investigation. In November 2002, when asked by Chris Matthews about Iraq, she said, "It is clear that a lot of people in the administration have some old scores to settle." HILLPAC, her leadership PAC, raised $3.2 million in the 2002 cycle and contributed more than $1 million to Democrats across the country, including $21,000 in Iowa and $15,000 in New Hampshire; she put on fundraisers for fellow Democrats in her Washington house.

Clinton has put forward initiatives on some issues not likely to get great publicity. In 2001 she advanced an eight-point plan for dealing with health problems caused by environmental defects and tried to reduce the additional patent protection given pharmaceutical companies who test the effects of drugs on children. She supported an increase in the work requirements for welfare recipients and giving states less leeway to excuse recipients from them. She and Schumer met with Bush on September 13, 2001, and when Schumer asked for $20 billion in aid to New York, Bush said, "You got it." In the weeks and months afterward she and Schumer worked on the necessarily difficult details. She worked to get payments to same-sex partners of those killed on September 11 and to prevent deportation of illegal immigrants whose spouses died then. She tried to get a separate official in the Department of Homeland Security in charge of security on the Canadian border and called for stationing the National Guard around New York airports. In October 2001 at a rock concert in honor of rescue workers, police and fire fighters booed her. She responded graciously. "Oh, you know, I was just happy to be there. I have gotten used to being in situations in political life, either vicariously or on my own, where that just happens sometimes. … They can blow off steam any way they want to. They've earned it."

Clinton's propensity for bipartisanship and her partisanship were on display at the opening of the 108th Congress in January 2003. In December she had gotten agreement with Don Nickles on a compromise proposal to extend unemployment benefits. It was the first item of business in the new Congress. But unexpectedly Clinton rose and offered an amendment to extend coverage to 1 million people whose benefits had expired. This triggered several hours of debate on parliamentary motions--a tough initiation for the new Majority Leader Bill Frist. Eventually Clinton's amendment was rejected and the compromise was passed. In the new Congress, Clinton was elected head of the Democrats' Steering and Coordination Committee, a job that has never generated much publicity for its incumbent; but this gives her an institutional base for her behind-the-scenes partisan strategizing.

Will Hillary Rodham Clinton run for president? In 2004? In 2008? She has repeated many times that she has committed herself to serving out her term in the Senate and in June 2003 she told the Associated Press she would not consider running for president in 2004 despite being encouraged to by some Democrats. 2008 is a different matter. Unless a Democrat is elected president in 2004, Clinton seems very likely to run in 2008. Although she had a large core of detractors among the national electorate, she has an even larger core of voters who have strong positive feelings toward her. Her chances of winning reelection in 2006 are excellent, and her responses then to the inevitable question of whether she will run for president may be telling. Her poll numbers in New York are strong. New York voters have never defeated an incumbent Democratic senator, and they have never shown much resentment when their officeholders run for president.

Recent News Coverage
Search the CongressDaily, Hotline, National Journal and Technology Daily archives using the form below:

DC Office
476 RSOB 20510, 202-224-4451; Fax: 202-228-0282; Web site: clinton.senate.gov

State Offices
Albany, 518-431-0120; Buffalo,716-854-9725; Hartsdale,914-725-9294; Lowville,315-376-6118; Melville,631-249-2825; New York City,212-688-6262; Rochester,585-263-6250; Syracuse,315-448-0470.

Committees

• Democratic Steering Committee Chairman
.
• Armed Services: Airland; Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Readiness & Management Support.
• Environment & Public Works: Clean Air, Climate Change & Nuclear Safety; Fisheries, Wildlife & Water.
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions: Aging; Children & Families.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	95	60	100	88	58	50	17	45	10	0	--
2001	95	--	100	88	--	--	3	43	12	--	0

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	87%	--	13%		95%	--	0%
Social	70%	--	20%		82%	--	0%
Foreign	61%	--	27%		70%	--	27%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 2. Expand Patients' Rights Y 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Permit ANWR Development N 5. Confirm Ashcroft as AG N 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts N		7. $ for Hate Crime Prosecution Y  8. Overseas Military Abortions Y  9. Bar Coop. with Intl. Court Y 10. Trade Promotion Authority N 11. Authorize Force in Iraq Y 12. Homeland Sec. Dept. Union Y

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2000 general	Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-L-WF)	3,747,310	55%	$41,469,898
	Rick Lazio (R-C)	2,915,730	43%	$40,576,273
	Other	116,799	2%
2000 primary	Hillary Rodham Clinton (D)	565,353	82%
	Mark S. McMahon (D)	124,315	18%
1994 general	Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-L)	2,646,541	55%	$6,705,482
	Bernadette Castro (R-C)	1,988,308	42%	$1,581,901
	Other	155,487	3%