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Putting her senate record aside, her experience as First Lady is long and distinguished.
When asked about his wife's role in his administration in August of 2000, President Bill Clinton said "She basically had an unprecedented level of activity in her present position over the last eight years.''
Her record as First Lady, Hillary Clinton says, includes work on a major Clinton administration child-care initiative, a huge federal-state children's health insurance program, adoption and foster care bills and foreign aid appropriations for small loans overseas.
''The record's there, and what I did is sort of self-evident I think, but it may come as new information to a lot of people,'' Mrs. Clinton said in an interview in 2000.
Pressed later about whether her new descriptions of acting as, in essence, a senior presidential adviser went beyond the job of first lady, Mrs. Clinton laughed out loud and said: ''I'm not going to have it any more. And the next first lady doesn't have to do it.''
Agency heads, other administration officials, Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill generally confirm Mrs. Clinton's assertions, but say that her role was kept quiet to avoid the kind of vilification she had attracted over her central part in health care policy.
Mrs. Clinton described her White House issues staff, which had offices in both the West Wing and the old Executive Office Building, ''as part of the domestic policy operation in the White House.'' Although she also had a small staff in the East Wing to handle first lady social responsibilities, Mrs. Clinton said that ''I realized very soon that, you know, if I had some first lady staff over here, I wouldn't be able to get things done.''
She said that she and her policy staff had the responsibility for pushing legislation and programs that would benefit children, women and health care -- issues that have concerned her, she said, for the last 30 years.
Mrs. Clinton's Democratic supporters on Capitol Hill echo her claims.
''Her office and her in particular were key allies of ours and the progressives in the Senate who were trying to pursue an agenda in the areas of children, education, health care and job training,'' said Nick Littlefield, who worked with Senator Edward M. Kennedy and was the staff director to the Health, Education and Labor Committee at the time. He added that ''once we discovered that Mrs. Clinton was running a public advocacy organization inside the White House, it followed automatically that we would start talking to her.''
She said, for example, that the Clinton administration program to guarantee free immunizations for poor and uninsured children, passed in 1993, ''was basically drafted in my office under my supervision.'' The program was a precursor to health care and its policy was largely rejected by Congress, but the Clinton administration did get $585 million for vaccines.
Mrs. Clinton also said that her staff had a large part in the development of the Corporation for National Service, the Clinton administration's domestic version of the Peace Corps.
''I hired Shirley Sagawa, who had been Ted Kennedy's person on national service, and so basically it was my staff that was involved in drafting that legislation,'' she said.
Eli J. Segal, the first chief executive of the Corporation for National Service and the 1992 Clinton campaign chief of staff, called the first lady's assertion ''100 percent correct.''
Among her other accomplishments, Mrs. Clinton said she helped to initiate and promote the Children's Health Insurance Program, created by Congress in 1997 to provide $24 billion over five years to states to insure children.
''She was a one-woman army inside the White House to get this done,'' Mr. Littlefield of the Health, Education and Labor Committee said. He said that he and Senator Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who was the major force behind the bill, enlisted Mrs. Clinton's help in the spring of 1997 when the president became ''skittish'' about the program. Mr. Littlefield said the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, was threatening that it was a ''deal buster'' on the balanced budget agreement that he and Mr. Clinton had reached.
''At that point we went to Mrs. Clinton and said, 'You've got to get the president to come around on this thing,' '' Mr. Littlefield said. ''And she said, 'Absolutely.' And we very quickly noticed a change. The president was very much on board.''
She also said she helped to write bills on adoption and foster care, and lobbied for them.
At the end of the 1997 Congressional session, Representative Dave Camp, a conservative Michigan Republican who was frantically negotiating to save an adoption bill, got a call in the House cloakroom from Mrs. Clinton.
''It was 9:30 or 10 at night,'' Mr. Camp recalled. ''I thought only Congressional night owls did that. I was surprised. You know, you're working wearily on these things, and you're worrying whether this is doing any good.'' Mrs. Clinton gave him a pep talk, Mr. Camp said, and told him the bill was worth it.
''I want to be honest,'' he said. ''It was helpful to me.''
The bill, an administration priority intended to speed up the adoption of children in foster care, had been heavily promoted by Mrs. Clinton on Capitol Hill. Four days after her call, it passed the House and Senate and was soon signed into law by the president.
Others in the Clinton Administration said that they learned to count on Mrs. Clinton as more than a spokeswoman.
''I don't think that the Endowment would be alive today if it weren't for strong White House support, and I'm sure she plays a very important role,'' said Jane Alexander, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
At the Agency for International Development, Brian Atwood, the administrator, said of Mrs. Clinton's grasp of complex development issues: ''She understands these issues better than 90 percent of the people who operate within the foreign policy community.''
Mrs. Clinton has been working with A.I.D. to import to inner cities lessons learned abroad, on child immunization, for example, and inexpensive techniques to combat diarrhea. She has taken a particularly strong interest in ''microenterprise lending,'' or efforts in developing nations and troubled cities to lend small amounts of money for new businesses, often run by women.
It is no coincidence, Mr. Atwood said, that the Administration is seeking to slightly increase the budget for A.I.D. next year. ''She deserves more credit for that,'' he said, ''than anyone.''
"She's very smart ... people rightly give her credit for having been a participant in the Clinton administration and for doing some heavy lifting on issues." Barack Obama, speaking of Hillary Clinton's White House experience and contradicting Obama supporters - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 8/22/07
In the Senate:
She has introduced legislation to tie Congressional salary increases to an increase in the minimum wage.
She helped pass legislation that encouraged investment to create jobs in struggling communities through the Renewal Communities program.
She has championed legislation to bring broadband Internet access to rural America.
She worked to strengthen the Children's Health Insurance Program, which increased coverage for children in low income and working families.
She authored legislation that has been enacted to improve quality and lower the cost of prescription drugs and to protect our food supply from bioterrorism.
She sponsored legislation to increase America's commitment to fighting the global HIV/AIDS crisis.
She's working for expanded use of information technology in the health care system to decrease administrative costs, lower premiums, and reduce medical errors.
She's worked to ensure the safety of prescription drugs for children, with legislation now included in the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act, and her legislation to help schools address environmental hazards. She has also proposed expanding access to child care.
She has passed legislation that will bring more qualified teachers into classrooms and more outstanding principals to lead our schools.
Hillary is one of the original cosponsors of the Prevention First Act to increase access to family planning. Her fight with the Bush Administration ensured that Plan B, an emergency contraceptive, will be available to millions of American women and will reduce the need for abortions.
She introduced the Count Every Vote Act of 2005 to ensure better protection of votes and to ensure that every vote is counted.
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