Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) is now the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee. After a hard-fought primary campaign against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Clinton cinched the nomination as delegates were awarded from the weekend primaries in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. According to the Associated Press, Clinton has earned the necessary 2,383 majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, however that number includes a survey of ‘superdelegates’ that Off on a Tangent cannot independently verify.
Clinton served as a law professor in Fayetteville, Arkansas, before her husband, former President Bill Clinton (D), was elected Arkansas Attorney General in 1976. The couple then moved to Little Rock and Hillary took a position at the Rose Law Firm and later became a partner. She also served on a number of boards, including six years on the Board of Directors of the Arkansas-based retail giant WalMart.
Bill Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978 and served two years before being defeated in a reelection campaign. He was elected again in 1982, and this time held the office until his resignation in 1992. He was elected President of the United States in 1992 and served two terms. Hillary, in her role as First Lady of Arkansas and then First Lady of the United States, became more and more politically involved during this period. Most notably, she was heavily involved in an ill-fated health care reform effort that was abandoned in 1994 after it failed to gain the support of the Democratic majorities in Congress.
As Bill Clinton prepared to leave the White House, Hillary embarked on a campaign to become a U.S. Senator from New York. She was elected in 2000, and then reelected to a second term in 2006. She ran for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States in 2008, but lost to now-President Barack Obama (D). After Obama was elected, he nominated his erstwhile opponent to be his Secretary of State. Clinton served in that role until her resignation in 2013. Clinton is currently under federal investigation for using an insecure private email server for official Department of State business during her time as Secretary of State, an arrangement that likely violated federal open-records and security-classification laws.
If elected in November, Hillary Clinton would be the first woman, and the first spouse of a former president, to serve as President of the United States.