Her service as secretary of state provides vital foreign policy experience. She served as a U.S. senator from New York and spent eight years as first lady during her husband’s presidency. Early in her career, she was a lawyer for the congressional committee that investigated President Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal.

During the campaign, Clinton has shown herself to be more moderate than President Barack Obama. Over the years she has learned that in a democracy, politics is the art of the achievable.

In her husband’s first term as president, she chaired the task force that produced a plan for universal health care. That proposal quickly ran aground, but she continued working with lawmakers of both parties to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program to insure more kids.

Despite criticism that she won her Senate seat in 2000 by piggybacking on her husband’s success, she earned a reputation for hard work and bipartisanship during her term. When her 2008 presidential campaign was knocked down by the Obama whirlwind, she gracefully accepted the voters’ decision and joined his Cabinet. Her work as his secretary of state — traveling nearly 1 million miles — proved a moderating force for realism within the administration.