Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham was born in Chicago, Oct. 26, 1947, the daughter of Hugh and Dorothy Howell Rodham. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and Yale Law School.
After graduation, Hillary Rodham moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton, a Yale classmate who would later become governor of Arkansas and the 42nd president of the United States. They have one daughter, Chelsea.
In Arkansas, Hillary Clinton ran a legal aid clinic for the poor, became a partner with the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock and led a task force to improve the public schools.
As first lady from 1993 to 2001, she led a task force on health care reform and wrote three books, It Takes a Village and Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets and An Invitation to the White House. She would later write a memoir, Living History. Both she and Barack Obama have won Grammy Awards for spoken-word recordings of their books.
In her final months in the White House, Hillary Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. She was re-elected in 2006. She is a Methodist.
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, the son of Barack Obama Sr., a native of Kenya, and Ann Dunham Obama, a native of Kansas.
Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles, then graduated from Columbia University in 1983. He worked as a community organizer with a church-based group in Chicago, then attended Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
After graduation, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and served for eight years. In 2004, he was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Boston and won a race for the U.S. Senate, only the third African-American elected since Reconstruction. He is the author of two best-selling books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope.
He and his wife, Michelle, have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. They are members of Trinity United Church of Christ.
Mike Huckabee
Michael Dale Huckabee was born in Hope, Ark., Aug. 24, 1955, the son of Dorsey W. and Mae Elder Huckabee. He is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., and did postgraduate work at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
