Clinton had been preparing for a potential candidacy for United States President since at least early 2003. On January 20, 2007, Clinton announced via her web site the formation of a presidential exploratory committee for the United States presidential election of 2008. She stated, "I'm in, and I'm in to win."No woman has ever been nominated by a major party for President of the United States. In April 2007, the Clintons liquidated a blind trust that had been established when Bill Clinton became president in 1993, in order to avoid the possibility of ethical conflicts or political embarrassments in the trust as Hillary Clinton undertook her presidential race. Later disclosure statements revealed that the couple's worth was now upwards of $50 million, and that they had earned over $100 million since 2000, with most of it coming from Bill Clinton's books, speaking engagements, and other activities.
Clinton speaking at a large campaign rally. South Hall, San Jose, California, February 1, 2008.
Clinton led the field of candidates competing for the Democratic nomination in opinion polls for the election throughout the first half of 2007. Most polls placed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as Clinton's closest competitors in the early caucus and primary election states. Clinton and Obama both set records for early fundraising, swapping the money lead each quarter, while Clinton generally maintained her lead in the polls. In late August 2007, a major contributor to, and "bundler" for, Clinton's campaign, called a "HillRaiser", Norman Hsu, was revealed to be a 15-years-long fugitive in an investment fraud case. He was also suspected of having broken campaign finance law regarding his bundling collections. The Clinton campaign said it would refund to 260 donors the full $850,000 in bundled donations raised by Hsu, who was subsequently indicted on new investment fraud charges. By September 2007, opinion polling in the first six states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses showed that Clinton was leading in all of them, with the races being closest in Iowa and South Carolina. By October 2007, national polls had Clinton far ahead of any Democratic competitor. At the end of October, Clinton suffered what writers for The Washington Post, ABC News, The Politico, and other outlets, characterized as a rare poor debate performance against Obama, Edwards, and her other opponents. Subsequently, the race tightened considerably, especially in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, with Clinton losing her lead in some polls by December.
Clinton campaigning at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before Super Tuesday 2008.
In the first vote of 2008, she placed third with 29.45 percent of the state delegate selections in the January 3, 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus to Obama's 37.58 percent and Edwards' 29.75 percent.Obama gained ground in national polling in the next few days, with all polls predicting a win for him, sometimes by double digits, in the New Hampshire primary. However, Clinton gained a surprise win there on January 8, defeating Obama by 39 percent to 37 percent. Explanations for her New Hampshire comeback varied but often centered on her being seen more sympathetically, especially by women, after her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke while responding to a voter's question the day before the election. The nature of the contest fractured in the next few days, when several remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and one remark by Hillary Clinton concerning Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson,were perceived by many as, accidentally or intentionally, limiting Obama as a racially-oriented candidate or otherwise denying the post-racial significance and accomplishments of his campaign. Despite attempts by both Hillary Clinton and Obama to downplay the issue, Democratic voting became more polarized as a result, with Clinton losing much of her support among African Americans.She lost by a 55–27 percent margin to Obama in the January 26 South Carolina primarysetting up, with Edwards soon dropping out, an intense two-person contest for the twenty-two February 5 Super Tuesday states. Bill Clinton had made more statements attracting criticism for their perceived racial implications late in the South Carolina campaign, and by now his role was seen as damaging enough to her that a wave of supporters within and outside of the campaign said the former President "needs to stop."On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the largest states, such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts while Obama won more statesthey almost evenly divided the total number of delegates and the total popular vote.Obama then won the next eleven caucuses and primaries, often by large margins, and took the overall delegate lead from Clinton. On March 4, Clinton broke the string of losses by winning in Ohio among other places, while Obama scored wins then and in the following week. Throughout the campaign, Obama dominated caucuses, and did well in primaries where African Americans or younger, college-educated, or more affluent voters were heavily represented; Clinton did well in primaries where Hispanics or older, non-college-educated, or working-class white voters predominated Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Obama's lead was solely due to his being African-American helped revive the racially-tinged aspect of the contest; Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign's finance committee as Clinton repudiated the remarks. Meanwhile, some Democratic party leaders expressed concern that the drawn-out campaign between the two could damage the winner in the general election contest against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain,especially if an eventual triumph for Clinton was won via party-appointed superdelegates. Clinton's admission in late March that her campaign statements about having been under hostile fire from snipers during a 1996 visit to U.S. troops at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia-Herzegovina, contradicted by video footage from the time, were not true,attracted considerable media attention, and risked undermining both her credibility and her claims of foreign policy expertise as First Lady. On April 22 she won the Pennsylvania primary by 9 points, keeping her campaign alive. However, on May 6, a narrow win in the Indiana primary, coupled with a large loss in the North Carolina primary, damaged her campaign's chances and led to speculation about whether she could or would remain in the race. She vowed to stay on through the remaining primaries,and a 41-point win in the May 13 West Virginia primary left her "more determined than ever to carry on this campaign".On May 31, the Democratic National Committee agreed to seat half of the Michigan and Florida delegates at the national convention, narrowing the delegate gap between Clinton and Obama, and increasing the number of delegates needed to win the nomination; but Obama retained a lead even after Clinton won the Puerto Rico primary on June 1.On the final primaries day of June 3, 2008, Obama gained enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee.Clinton announced she would make no immediate decision on her course of action, although she earlier hinted that she would be interested in being a vice-presidential candidate for Obama.
Political positions
Main article: Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton
In a Gallup poll conducted during May 2005, 54 percent of respondents considered Senator Clinton a liberal, 30 percent considered her a moderate, and 9 percent considered her a conservative.Several organizations have attempted to measure her place on the political spectrum scientifically:
National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 in the political spectrum, relative to the then-current Senate, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal's subsequent rankings placed her as the 32nd-most liberal senator in 2006 and 16th-most liberal senator in 2007.
A 2004 analysis by political scientists Joshua D. Clinton of Princeton University, Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers of Stanford University found her to be likely the sixth-to-eighth-most liberal Senator.
The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rated her votes from 2003 through 2006 as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three areas: Economic, Social, and Foreign; averaged for the four years, the ratings are: Economic = 75 liberal, 23 conservative; Social = 83 liberal, 6 conservative; Foreign = 66 liberal, 30 conservative. Average = 75 liberal, 20 conservative.Various interest groups have given Senator Clinton scores or grades as to how well her votes align with the positions of the group:
Through 2007, she has an average lifetime 93 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action.Through 2007, she has a lifetime 8 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.
She received an 'A' (excellent) on the Drum Major Institute's 2005 Congressional Scorecard on middle-class issues.
The American Civil Liberties Union has given her a 75 percent lifetime rating through September 2007.
NARAL Pro-Choice America consistently gave her a 100 percent pro-choice rating from 2002 to 2007.
The League of Conservation Voters has given her a lifetime 90 percent pro-environment action rating through 2006.Americans for Better Immigration has given her a lifetime grade of 'D-' (very near failing) through October 2007 on their Immigration-Reduction Report Card.
The National Rifle Association gave her an 'F' (failing) rating in 2006 for her stance on Second Amendment issues.
Writings and recordings
As First Lady of the United States, Clinton published a weekly syndicated newspaper column titled "Talking It Over" from 1995 to 2000, distributed by Creators Syndicate. It focused on her experiences and those of women, children and families she encountered during her travels around the world.In 1996, Clinton presented a vision for the children of America in the book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Clinton received the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 1997 for the book's audio recording. The title refers to an African proverb that states "It takes a village to raise a child".
Other books released by Clinton when she was First Lady include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History (2000). In 2001, she wrote the foreword to the children's book Beatrice's Goat.
In 2003, Clinton released a 562-page autobiography, Living History. In anticipation of high sales, publisher Simon & Schuster paid Clinton a near-record advance of $8 million.The book set a first-week sales record for a non-fiction work, went on to sell more than one million copies in the first month following publication, and was translated into twelve foreign languages. Clinton's audio recording of the book earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Cultural and political image
Hillary Clinton has frequently been featured in the media and popular culture from a wide spectrum of perspectives. In 1995, New York Times writer Todd Purdum labeled Clinton "the First Lady as Rorschach test", an assessment echoed at the time by feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, who said, "Coverage of Hillary Clinton is a massive Rorschach test of the evolution of women in our society."
Clinton has often been described in the popular media as a polarizing figure, with some arguing otherwise. James Madison University political science professor Valerie Sulfaro's 2007 study used the American National Election Studies' "feeling thermometer" polls, which measure the degree of opinion about a political figure, to find that such polls during Clinton's First Lady years confirm the "conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing figure", with the added insight that "affect towards Mrs. Clinton as first lady tended to be very positive or very negative, with a fairly constant one fourth of respondents feeling ambivalent or neutral." University of California, San Diego political science professor Gary Jacobson's 2006 study of partisan polarization found that in a state-by-state survey of job approval ratings of the state's senators, Clinton had the fourth-largest partisan difference of any senator, with a 50 percentage point difference in approval between New York's Democrats and Republicans. Northern Illinois University political science professor Barbara Burrell's 2000 study found that Clinton's Gallup poll favorability numbers broke sharply along partisan lines throughout her time as First Lady, with 70 to 90 percent of Democrats typically viewing her favorably while 20 to 40 percent of Republicans did. University of Wisconsin political science professor Charles Franklin analyzed her record of favorable versus unfavorable ratings in public opinion polls, and found that there was more variation in them during her First Lady years than her Senate years.The Senate years showed favorable ratings around 50 percent and unfavorable ratings in the mid-40 percent range; Franklin noted that, "This sharp split is, of course, one of the more widely remarked aspects of Sen. Clinton's public image." McGill University professor of history Gil Troy titled his 2006 biography of her Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, and wrote that after the 1992 campaign, Clinton "was a polarizing figure, with 42 percent [of the public] saying she came closer to their values and lifestyle than previous first ladies and 41 percent disagreeing." Troy further wrote that Hillary Clinton "has been uniquely controversial and contradictory since she first appeared on the national radar screen in 1992" and that she "has alternately fascinated, bedeviled, bewitched, and appalled Americans."Burrell's study found women consistently rating Clinton more favorably than men by about ten percentage points during her First Lady years. Jacobson's study found a positive correlation across all senators between being women and receiving a partisan-polarized response. Colorado State University communication studies professor Karrin Vasby Anderson describes the First Lady position as a "site" for American womanhood, one ready made for the symbolic negotiation of female identity. In particular, Anderson states there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. Burrell, as well as biographers Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., note that Clinton achieved her highest approval ratings as First Lady late in 1998, not for any professional or political achievement of her own but for being seen as the victim of her husband's very public infidelity. University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson saw Hillary Clinton as an exemplar of the double bind, who though able to live in a "both-and" world of both career and family, nevertheless "became a surrogate on whom we projected our attitudes about attributes once thought incompatible", leading to her being placed in a variety of no-win situations. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found political cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of, to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different perspectives. A 2006 survey by The New York Observer found "a virtual cottage industry" of "anti-Clinton literature", put out by Regnery Publishing and other conservative imprints, with titles such as Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House, and Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless .... Books praising Clinton did not sell nearly as well (other than the memoirs written by her and her husband). When she ran for Senate in 2000, a number of fundraising groups such as Save Our Senate and the Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton sprang up to oppose her. Van Natta, Jr. found that Republican and conservative groups viewed her as a reliable "bogeyman" to mention in fundraising letters, on a par with Ted Kennedy and the equivalent of Democratic and liberal appeals mentioning Newt Gingrich.Going into the early stages of her presidential campaign for 2008, a Time magazine cover showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate". By December 2007, communications professor Jamieson observed that there was a large amount of misogyny present about Clinton on the Internet, up to and including Facebook and other sites devoted to depictions reducing Clinton to sexual humiliation. She noted that, in response to widespread commenting on the nature of Clinton's laugh,that "We know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle."Following Clinton's "choked up moment" and related incidents before the January 2008 New Hampshire primary, both The New York Times and Newsweek found that discussion of gender's role in the campaign had moved into the national political discourse. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham summed the relationship between Clinton and the American public by saying that the New Hampshire events, "brought an odd truth to light: though Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the periphery or in the middle of national life for decades ... she is one of the most recognizable but least understood figures in American politics."
Awards and honors
Main article: Hillary Rodham Clinton awards and honors
Clinton has received over a dozen awards and honors during her career, from both American and international organizations, for her activities concerning health, women, and children.
Electoral history
New York United States Senate election, 2000
Party
Candidate
Votes
%
±%
Democratic
Hillary Rodham Clinton
3,747,310
55.3
Republican
Rick Lazio
2,915,730
43.0
New York United States Senate election, 2006
Party
Candidate
Votes
%
±%
Democratic
Hillary Rodham Clinton(Incumbent)
3,008,428
67.0
+11.7
Republican
John Spencer
1,392,189
31.0
-12.0
Clinton speaking at a large campaign rally. South Hall, San Jose, California, February 1, 2008.
Clinton led the field of candidates competing for the Democratic nomination in opinion polls for the election throughout the first half of 2007. Most polls placed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as Clinton's closest competitors in the early caucus and primary election states. Clinton and Obama both set records for early fundraising, swapping the money lead each quarter, while Clinton generally maintained her lead in the polls. In late August 2007, a major contributor to, and "bundler" for, Clinton's campaign, called a "HillRaiser", Norman Hsu, was revealed to be a 15-years-long fugitive in an investment fraud case. He was also suspected of having broken campaign finance law regarding his bundling collections. The Clinton campaign said it would refund to 260 donors the full $850,000 in bundled donations raised by Hsu, who was subsequently indicted on new investment fraud charges. By September 2007, opinion polling in the first six states holding Democratic primaries or caucuses showed that Clinton was leading in all of them, with the races being closest in Iowa and South Carolina. By October 2007, national polls had Clinton far ahead of any Democratic competitor. At the end of October, Clinton suffered what writers for The Washington Post, ABC News, The Politico, and other outlets, characterized as a rare poor debate performance against Obama, Edwards, and her other opponents. Subsequently, the race tightened considerably, especially in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, with Clinton losing her lead in some polls by December.
Clinton campaigning at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two days before Super Tuesday 2008.
In the first vote of 2008, she placed third with 29.45 percent of the state delegate selections in the January 3, 2008 Iowa Democratic caucus to Obama's 37.58 percent and Edwards' 29.75 percent.Obama gained ground in national polling in the next few days, with all polls predicting a win for him, sometimes by double digits, in the New Hampshire primary. However, Clinton gained a surprise win there on January 8, defeating Obama by 39 percent to 37 percent. Explanations for her New Hampshire comeback varied but often centered on her being seen more sympathetically, especially by women, after her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke while responding to a voter's question the day before the election. The nature of the contest fractured in the next few days, when several remarks by Bill Clinton and other surrogates, and one remark by Hillary Clinton concerning Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson,were perceived by many as, accidentally or intentionally, limiting Obama as a racially-oriented candidate or otherwise denying the post-racial significance and accomplishments of his campaign. Despite attempts by both Hillary Clinton and Obama to downplay the issue, Democratic voting became more polarized as a result, with Clinton losing much of her support among African Americans.She lost by a 55–27 percent margin to Obama in the January 26 South Carolina primarysetting up, with Edwards soon dropping out, an intense two-person contest for the twenty-two February 5 Super Tuesday states. Bill Clinton had made more statements attracting criticism for their perceived racial implications late in the South Carolina campaign, and by now his role was seen as damaging enough to her that a wave of supporters within and outside of the campaign said the former President "needs to stop."On Super Tuesday, Clinton won the largest states, such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts while Obama won more statesthey almost evenly divided the total number of delegates and the total popular vote.Obama then won the next eleven caucuses and primaries, often by large margins, and took the overall delegate lead from Clinton. On March 4, Clinton broke the string of losses by winning in Ohio among other places, while Obama scored wins then and in the following week. Throughout the campaign, Obama dominated caucuses, and did well in primaries where African Americans or younger, college-educated, or more affluent voters were heavily represented; Clinton did well in primaries where Hispanics or older, non-college-educated, or working-class white voters predominated Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Obama's lead was solely due to his being African-American helped revive the racially-tinged aspect of the contest; Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign's finance committee as Clinton repudiated the remarks. Meanwhile, some Democratic party leaders expressed concern that the drawn-out campaign between the two could damage the winner in the general election contest against presumptive Republican nominee John McCain,especially if an eventual triumph for Clinton was won via party-appointed superdelegates. Clinton's admission in late March that her campaign statements about having been under hostile fire from snipers during a 1996 visit to U.S. troops at Tuzla Air Base in Bosnia-Herzegovina, contradicted by video footage from the time, were not true,attracted considerable media attention, and risked undermining both her credibility and her claims of foreign policy expertise as First Lady. On April 22 she won the Pennsylvania primary by 9 points, keeping her campaign alive. However, on May 6, a narrow win in the Indiana primary, coupled with a large loss in the North Carolina primary, damaged her campaign's chances and led to speculation about whether she could or would remain in the race. She vowed to stay on through the remaining primaries,and a 41-point win in the May 13 West Virginia primary left her "more determined than ever to carry on this campaign".On May 31, the Democratic National Committee agreed to seat half of the Michigan and Florida delegates at the national convention, narrowing the delegate gap between Clinton and Obama, and increasing the number of delegates needed to win the nomination; but Obama retained a lead even after Clinton won the Puerto Rico primary on June 1.On the final primaries day of June 3, 2008, Obama gained enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee.Clinton announced she would make no immediate decision on her course of action, although she earlier hinted that she would be interested in being a vice-presidential candidate for Obama.
Political positions
Main article: Political positions of Hillary Rodham Clinton
In a Gallup poll conducted during May 2005, 54 percent of respondents considered Senator Clinton a liberal, 30 percent considered her a moderate, and 9 percent considered her a conservative.Several organizations have attempted to measure her place on the political spectrum scientifically:
National Journal's 2004 study of roll-call votes assigned Clinton a rating of 30 in the political spectrum, relative to the then-current Senate, with a rating of 1 being most liberal and 100 being most conservative. National Journal's subsequent rankings placed her as the 32nd-most liberal senator in 2006 and 16th-most liberal senator in 2007.
A 2004 analysis by political scientists Joshua D. Clinton of Princeton University, Simon Jackman and Doug Rivers of Stanford University found her to be likely the sixth-to-eighth-most liberal Senator.
The Almanac of American Politics, edited by Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen, rated her votes from 2003 through 2006 as liberal or conservative, with 100 as the highest rating, in three areas: Economic, Social, and Foreign; averaged for the four years, the ratings are: Economic = 75 liberal, 23 conservative; Social = 83 liberal, 6 conservative; Foreign = 66 liberal, 30 conservative. Average = 75 liberal, 20 conservative.Various interest groups have given Senator Clinton scores or grades as to how well her votes align with the positions of the group:
Through 2007, she has an average lifetime 93 percent "Liberal Quotient" from Americans for Democratic Action.Through 2007, she has a lifetime 8 percent rating from the American Conservative Union.
She received an 'A' (excellent) on the Drum Major Institute's 2005 Congressional Scorecard on middle-class issues.
The American Civil Liberties Union has given her a 75 percent lifetime rating through September 2007.
NARAL Pro-Choice America consistently gave her a 100 percent pro-choice rating from 2002 to 2007.
The League of Conservation Voters has given her a lifetime 90 percent pro-environment action rating through 2006.Americans for Better Immigration has given her a lifetime grade of 'D-' (very near failing) through October 2007 on their Immigration-Reduction Report Card.
The National Rifle Association gave her an 'F' (failing) rating in 2006 for her stance on Second Amendment issues.
Writings and recordings
As First Lady of the United States, Clinton published a weekly syndicated newspaper column titled "Talking It Over" from 1995 to 2000, distributed by Creators Syndicate. It focused on her experiences and those of women, children and families she encountered during her travels around the world.In 1996, Clinton presented a vision for the children of America in the book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The book was a New York Times Best Seller, and Clinton received the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 1997 for the book's audio recording. The title refers to an African proverb that states "It takes a village to raise a child".
Other books released by Clinton when she was First Lady include Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets (1998) and An Invitation to the White House: At Home with History (2000). In 2001, she wrote the foreword to the children's book Beatrice's Goat.
In 2003, Clinton released a 562-page autobiography, Living History. In anticipation of high sales, publisher Simon & Schuster paid Clinton a near-record advance of $8 million.The book set a first-week sales record for a non-fiction work, went on to sell more than one million copies in the first month following publication, and was translated into twelve foreign languages. Clinton's audio recording of the book earned her a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album.
Cultural and political image
Hillary Clinton has frequently been featured in the media and popular culture from a wide spectrum of perspectives. In 1995, New York Times writer Todd Purdum labeled Clinton "the First Lady as Rorschach test", an assessment echoed at the time by feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, who said, "Coverage of Hillary Clinton is a massive Rorschach test of the evolution of women in our society."
Clinton has often been described in the popular media as a polarizing figure, with some arguing otherwise. James Madison University political science professor Valerie Sulfaro's 2007 study used the American National Election Studies' "feeling thermometer" polls, which measure the degree of opinion about a political figure, to find that such polls during Clinton's First Lady years confirm the "conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing figure", with the added insight that "affect towards Mrs. Clinton as first lady tended to be very positive or very negative, with a fairly constant one fourth of respondents feeling ambivalent or neutral." University of California, San Diego political science professor Gary Jacobson's 2006 study of partisan polarization found that in a state-by-state survey of job approval ratings of the state's senators, Clinton had the fourth-largest partisan difference of any senator, with a 50 percentage point difference in approval between New York's Democrats and Republicans. Northern Illinois University political science professor Barbara Burrell's 2000 study found that Clinton's Gallup poll favorability numbers broke sharply along partisan lines throughout her time as First Lady, with 70 to 90 percent of Democrats typically viewing her favorably while 20 to 40 percent of Republicans did. University of Wisconsin political science professor Charles Franklin analyzed her record of favorable versus unfavorable ratings in public opinion polls, and found that there was more variation in them during her First Lady years than her Senate years.The Senate years showed favorable ratings around 50 percent and unfavorable ratings in the mid-40 percent range; Franklin noted that, "This sharp split is, of course, one of the more widely remarked aspects of Sen. Clinton's public image." McGill University professor of history Gil Troy titled his 2006 biography of her Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, and wrote that after the 1992 campaign, Clinton "was a polarizing figure, with 42 percent [of the public] saying she came closer to their values and lifestyle than previous first ladies and 41 percent disagreeing." Troy further wrote that Hillary Clinton "has been uniquely controversial and contradictory since she first appeared on the national radar screen in 1992" and that she "has alternately fascinated, bedeviled, bewitched, and appalled Americans."Burrell's study found women consistently rating Clinton more favorably than men by about ten percentage points during her First Lady years. Jacobson's study found a positive correlation across all senators between being women and receiving a partisan-polarized response. Colorado State University communication studies professor Karrin Vasby Anderson describes the First Lady position as a "site" for American womanhood, one ready made for the symbolic negotiation of female identity. In particular, Anderson states there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. Burrell, as well as biographers Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., note that Clinton achieved her highest approval ratings as First Lady late in 1998, not for any professional or political achievement of her own but for being seen as the victim of her husband's very public infidelity. University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson saw Hillary Clinton as an exemplar of the double bind, who though able to live in a "both-and" world of both career and family, nevertheless "became a surrogate on whom we projected our attitudes about attributes once thought incompatible", leading to her being placed in a variety of no-win situations. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found political cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of, to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different perspectives. A 2006 survey by The New York Observer found "a virtual cottage industry" of "anti-Clinton literature", put out by Regnery Publishing and other conservative imprints, with titles such as Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House, and Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless .... Books praising Clinton did not sell nearly as well (other than the memoirs written by her and her husband). When she ran for Senate in 2000, a number of fundraising groups such as Save Our Senate and the Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton sprang up to oppose her. Van Natta, Jr. found that Republican and conservative groups viewed her as a reliable "bogeyman" to mention in fundraising letters, on a par with Ted Kennedy and the equivalent of Democratic and liberal appeals mentioning Newt Gingrich.Going into the early stages of her presidential campaign for 2008, a Time magazine cover showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate". By December 2007, communications professor Jamieson observed that there was a large amount of misogyny present about Clinton on the Internet, up to and including Facebook and other sites devoted to depictions reducing Clinton to sexual humiliation. She noted that, in response to widespread commenting on the nature of Clinton's laugh,that "We know that there's language to condemn female speech that doesn't exist for male speech. We call women's speech shrill and strident. And Hillary Clinton's laugh was being described as a cackle."Following Clinton's "choked up moment" and related incidents before the January 2008 New Hampshire primary, both The New York Times and Newsweek found that discussion of gender's role in the campaign had moved into the national political discourse. Newsweek editor Jon Meacham summed the relationship between Clinton and the American public by saying that the New Hampshire events, "brought an odd truth to light: though Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on the periphery or in the middle of national life for decades ... she is one of the most recognizable but least understood figures in American politics."
Awards and honors
Main article: Hillary Rodham Clinton awards and honors
Clinton has received over a dozen awards and honors during her career, from both American and international organizations, for her activities concerning health, women, and children.
Electoral history
New York United States Senate election, 2000
Party
Candidate
Votes
%
±%
Democratic
Hillary Rodham Clinton
3,747,310
55.3
Republican
Rick Lazio
2,915,730
43.0
New York United States Senate election, 2006
Party
Candidate
Votes
%
±%
Democratic
Hillary Rodham Clinton(Incumbent)
3,008,428
67.0
+11.7
Republican
John Spencer
1,392,189
31.0
-12.0
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