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Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected NY senator

First lady and New York senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton appears on stage with her daughter Chelsea at a victory celebration in New York City. PHOTO: REUTERS

Hillary Rodham Clinton defies stereotyping.

She's one of the world's most famous women, and the only first lady ever to be elected to public office. On Tuesday, she defeated Republican Representative Rick Lazio to take another step away from scandal and into history.

Her critics and supporters agree she could become the nation's first female president, an ambition she denies having. Indeed, at her victory speech, her words were all about New York.

``I promise you tonight, I will reach across party lines to bring progress for all of New York's families,'' the 53-year-old said. ``Today we voted as Democrats and Republicans; tomorrow, we begin again as New Yorkers.''

Clinton is an intellectual who attended Wellesley and Yale; a woman who describes her 1950s childhood as idyllic but rejected the stay-at-home mom route; and a women's rights advocate who stuck by her philandering husband.

Many of the contradictions are rooted in her childhood.

Born in 1947, the eldest of three, she grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge.

Her father, a drapery business owner, was a devout Methodist who prayed by his bedside every night. Her mother stayed at home, and once made Hillary face a bully, saying, ``There's no room for cowards in this house!''

A church group led Clinton ``to the world beyond our all-white middle-class suburb,'' arranging for her and other teenagers to baby-sit for migrant farm workers' families and to meet civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

After graduating from Wellesley in 1969, she went on to Yale Law School, adding a year to her studies to learn about child development and work for the Children's Defense Fund.

Clinton spent 1974 in Washington, researching constitutional grounds for impeaching President Richard Nixon. She then moved to Arkansas to join her soon-to-be husband, Bill Clinton, whom she'd met at Yale.

She worked for a prominent Little Rock law firm, but her proudest achievement as the governor's wife was leading a school reform commission.

As first lady, Clinton's biggest failure was health care reform, an initiative the president asked her to head but one that Congress and the public soundly rejected.

As a candidate for the Senate, her decision to stay married was questioned.

At a debate last month, she explained it this way: ``For my entire life, I've worked to make sure women had the choices they could make in their own lives that worked for them. I can't talk about anybody else's choice. I can only say mine are rooted in my religious faith, in my strong sense of family, and in what I believe is right.''
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