Former First Lady at home with the power game

The leader in US national polls, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton clinched a victory in New Hampshire to get her campaign back on track.

Mrs Clinton, 60, is the first wife of an American president to run for the office and no woman has been nominated as a presidential candidate by a major party.

Widely believed to be a polarising figure in US politics, the Democratic presidential hopeful is ranked among the world's most powerful people.

The former First Lady has also survived intense public scrutiny of her private life, standing by her husband Bill after his "inappropriate" behaviour and televised apology over the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is widely given credit for the fact that her husband became president at all.

Without her drive and ferocious ambition for him, it is said, Bill Clinton might not have aspired even to the governorship of Arkansas.

She was born in 1948 in Chicago into a family of "ironclad Republicans" but turned to the Democrats after teenage inner-city work.

She met Bill at Yale when she was "a frumpy, spectacle-wearing law student", and married him in 1975, saying: "I fell in love with him because he wasn't afraid of me."

Their daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980.

Mrs Clinton became uniquely powerful after her husband's election to the White House, becoming the first First Lady to keep an office in the West Wing of the White House.

She was given a formal role in the government to introduce health reforms, but it was a humiliating disaster which failed.

At the time, she asserted: "There is absolutely nothing to apologise for."

But later, in her autobiography, An American Story, she admitted she blamed herself "for botching healthcare, coming on too strong and galvanising our opponents".

More problems ensued. Her father died. The Whitewater land deal - which saw her become the first First Lady to be subpoenaed - and the mysterious death of one of the partners in her Arkansas law firm all added to the trials and tribulations that beset the Clintons.

Then she embarked on "gender politics", inviting female journalists to lunch, and starting her own newspaper column.

And there was more than just boredom that motivated her constantly to change her hairdos.

"If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle," she said once. And it worked.

But her campaigning style has become increasingly cautious in recent years.

After moving out of the White House and to New York, Mrs Clinton became the first First Lady to be elected to public office and the first female senator from the state in 2000.

She initially supported the Bush administration's stance on a number of foreign policy issues and voted for the Iraq War resolution.

But she now supports US troops while wanting to pull troops out of Iraq and criticising the Bush administrations handling of the war, saying the president has "squandered the respect, trust, and confidence of even our closest allies and friends" over the past six years.

She also opposes the administration on most domestic issues.

Re-elected to the Senate by a wide margin last year, she received a boost for her bid to become US president when she was named as the world's most admired powerful woman in a study compiled for Harper's Bazaar magazine in February 2007.

Her professional campaign has focused on crucial battleground states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, while making the most of her popularity in New York and utilising the internet and popular video websites to attract the youth vote.

She has also launched a network for leading women supporters and made use of former president Bill, who was popular with African Americans.

Mrs Clinton also raised eyebrows on the campaign trail in January by cracking a joke in Iowa about her experience dealing with "evil and bad men".

The former First Lady provoked a full 30 seconds of raucous guffawing when she made the comment in Iowa to an audience who were apparently certain she was referring to husband Bill Clinton's infidelities.

But the New York senator later insisted she not been talking about the former president, but said she had meant Osama bin Laden.

And she claimed no one in the room had thought her husband was the butt of the joke either. Many observers disagreed.

On turning 60 in October, she said was more patient with a "better understanding of what's really important in life".

Mrs Clinton, who admitted to getting tired on the campaign trail, insisted she was not a workaholic, saying she wanted to live "every day to the best that I can".

To date, she has raised more than 78 million dollars (£39m) for her campaign, with 15 million dollars (£7.5m) in the bank before it had even begun.

Brimming with confidence, she announced her 2008 presidential bid saying: "I'm in, and I'm in to win."