A look back at Hillary Clinton’s rise to US presidential nominee

Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is making U.S. history as the first woman to top a major party ticket in a presidential race.

So how did she get here?

CCTV America’s Jessica Stone takes a look back.

From Hillary Clinton’s early days, she was attracted to politics. She served as president of the Wellesley College Government Association and became the first ever student to speak at a commencement when she graduated in 1969.

On a grander stage, she saw the political process up close, alongside her husband, Bill Clinton, who took the presidential oath of office in 1993.

Hillary pioneered her role as a first lady who also served as a chief advisor to her husband on healthcare reform. While the effort was abandoned in 1994, the US Congress would go on to pass Barack Obama’s health care reforms in 2010.

In 1998, Hillary Clinton stood by her husband during his public admission of an affair with a White House intern and his subsequent impeachment by the US House of Representatives.

In 2000, she ran for and won a US Senate seat to represent New York. Despite having few ties to New York prior to her run, she beat her opponent by 12 percentage points.

Clinton went on to develop a reputation as pragmatic and hawkish, and cast a vote in support of the controversial Iraq War. She now calls that vote a mistake. She defended it when she ran for president in 2008, telling voters that then-president George W. Bush needed congressional authority to deal with Iraq.

After a bitter and close fought primary against candidate Barack Obama in 2008, Clinton ultimately lost. She went on to join forces with her former adversary, becoming US Secretary of State under President Obama.

She logged about a million and a half kilometers in the air over four years, some of that travel the result of Arab Spring uprisings that brought down governments from Tunisia, to Egypt and Libya.

But her role in handling the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya has become her Achilles heel.

One US ambassador and three US citizens died in the ambush. Critics said Clinton papered over a planned terrorist attack on the consulate, blaming instead a protest that got out of hand.

There have been seven congressional investigations into the incident, with Clinton herself testifying on Capitol Hill last October.

Clinton has also been dogged by scandal over using a private server and email address while serving as Secretary. Critics call it an intentional dodge to hide her communications, but an FBI investigation found no criminal wrongdoing by Clinton. She does admit though it was a poor choice.

A month after headlines emerged about her email use, Clinton announced her second run for the White House in April 2015.

Following a raucous race against socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton clinched the number of delegates needed to win her party’s nomination in June 2016, and hence became the first woman to do so in US history.

Source: CCTV