(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-06-08 08:36

WASHINGTON - U.S. senator Hillary Clinton formally ended her presidential bid on Saturday and endorsed senator Barack Obama, who beat her in the epic Democratic nomination contest.  

The question remains that whether she will become Obama's running mate.

No matter what her political future is, Clinton's name will go down the history as  the first woman who had a serious chance to become U.S. president.

Hillary Clinton is a senator representing New York.

She also was U.S. first lady from 1993 to 2001 while her husband Bill Clinton served as president.

In 1993, she headed a task force that developed proposed legislation to provide universal health care to all Americans.

That legislation ultimately was not passed, but she continues to make universal health care one of her top political goals.

Clinton was born October 26, 1947, and grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois.

She attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts and Yale Law School.

The Clintons have a daughter.

Name recognition and fundraising ability made Hillary an early front-runner for the Democrats, though she lost a series of races to Obama recently.

If Bill Clinton remains a divisive figure in American politics, that goes at least double for Hillary -- some estimates say one in three Americans would never vote for her. And the county has never yet elected a woman president.

Clinton was considered as the Democratic frontrunner before this year's Democratic nomination election.

However, she failed to clinch the nomination at the early stage of election and was never able to catch up with Obama in the number of delegates going to the national convention.

On June 3, Obama passed the threshold of 2,118 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination, effectively wiping Clinton out in the nomination race.