When Carol Moseley-Braun announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in February, she said she was running on a platform of "peace, prosperity and progress." She would conduct a grass-roots campaign to "generate the kind of support that will make this … a viable campaign," she said. Shortly thereafter she kicked off a speaking tour to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and quickly discovered how hard her "grass roots" support would be to find. In Des Moines, Iowa, for example, the woman who had become widely known as the first African-American female to win a seat to the U.S. Senate formally addressed an audience made up of a former college classmate, a conference hall filled with empty chairs, and a C-SPAN camera.

Moseley-Braun was born the oldest of four children on August 16, 1947 in a segregated middle-class neighborhood in Chicago, where her father, Joseph, served as a police officer and her mother, Edna, as a medical technician. When the couple divorced, Edna took the children to live with her at her mother's house.

The new neighborhood was poorer and more dangerous than what the family had been accustomed to, but Moseley-Braun committed herself to helping out with her siblings and doing well enough at school to enroll at the University of Illinois. She proved to be a dedicated and driven student. She financed her education by taking on second jobs at the post office and a grocery store and still found the time to get her feet wet in city politics by supporting future-Chicago Mayor Harold Washington's 1968 legislative campaign. In 1969 she received her bachelor's degree in political science and promptly enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School. It was there that Moseley-Braun met her future husband, Michael Braun, with whom she would have one child before their divorce in 1986.

In 1972 Moseley-Braun graduated from law school and briefly joined the law firm of Davis Miner & Barnhill before leaving for a position as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. During her tenure there between 1973 and 1977, Moseley-Braun won the U.S. Department of Justice Special Award for superior performance. The following year, with the support of Mayor Washington and a platform that emphasized education, she won a vacant seat in the Illinois House of Representatives.

Moseley-Braun would spend 10 years in the state legislature. From 1980 to 1987 she was the chief sponsor of virtually every funding bill that affected education in the city of Chicago, including the 1985 Urban School Improvement Act, which gave parents more power at schools citywide. Among her colleagues she soon acquired the reputation as a tenacious and willful debater who passionately advanced her position on issues. She was also a conciliator, able to bridge political disagreements and to form functional political alliances. Her success in the House of Representatives was so marked that she was voted to Assistant Majority Leader after her second term, the first African-American or woman to hold that position in Illinois.

In 1987 Mayor Washington and Illinois House Speaker Michael J. Madigan devised a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, gender-balanced "Dream Ticket" for the 1988 elections in Cook County, Illinois. Moseley-Braun was nominated as the Recorder of Deeds on that ticket even though no woman, let alone an African-American one, had ever held executive office in Cook County. Campaigning on the promise to modernize the widely antiquated agency, which was responsible for 300 employees and an $8 million annual budget, she easily won the election. Once in office she made good on her promises. She streamlined the agency through computerization and established policies to eliminate political patronage.

Moseley-Braun served out her term as the Cook County Recorder of Deeds with much success and praise, and in November 1991 she surprised Illinois by declaring her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. When she was asked in a 1992 interview how she came to this decision, Moseley-Braun said she had been enraged and motivated by the spectacle of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court.

When Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, announced his retirement from the bench in 1991, President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill his seat. Although Thomas refused to fully disclose his views on abortion and affirmative action, they were widely considered to be conservative and his nomination drew strong criticism from both liberals and civil rights groups. To compound the problem, allegations that years before he had sexually harassed one of his female employees, Anita Hill, mobilized feminist groups against him. His highly charged, controversial hearings before the Senate were televised nationally and polarized the nation. In the end the Senate confirmed Thomas 52-48.

Watching the Thomas hearings, Moseley-Braun became outraged. "I thought that the Senate had failed to do its job appropriately," she said in 1992. "The angrier I got at the way the Senate was carrying on, the more I became convinced that it absolutely needed a healthy dose of democracy." In the Democratic Senate primary Moseley-Braun upset two-term incumbent Alan J. Dixon, who had voted in favor of the Thomas confirmation, and went on to win the state election with 53 percent of the vote.

Moseley-Braun quickly became a sensation in the Senate. Soon after entering office she led a fight against what seemed to be a routine bill sponsored by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., which would have renewed a design patent for the Daughters of the Confederacy that featured the Confederate flag. Moseley-Braun argued that the flag was an offensive symbol of slavery and threatened to filibuster. The tactic worked. The Senate shot down the proposal 75 to 25. Moseley-Braun was also part of a complex power play that made Sen. Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., the Senate Majority Leader and paved her way to a seat on the powerful finance committee. Just as her success in the state legislature might have presaged, she was proving to be a tenacious senator who knew how to navigate the corridors of power.

But Moseley-Braun's term in office was also marked by scandal. Even before she came to Washington, rumors had surfaced that her campaign manager and then-fiancé, Kgosie Matthews, to whom she had been paying $15,000 a month, had sexually harassed several campaign staffers. Moseley-Braun defended Matthews against these allegations and embarked on a month-long journey to Africa with him before she took office.

Then in 1993 the Federal Election Commission launched a probe into her election campaign, which had $249,000 in unaccounted expenditures. The FEC investigated charges that Moseley-Braun had diverted these funds for personal trips and shopping sprees for herself and Matthews. Although the FEC eventually found that Moseley-Braun had failed to properly itemize and disclose thousands of dollars of campaign expenditures, the agency declined to take action.

The final straw may have been a trip she made to Nigeria in 1996, which incited fervent criticism from a broad coalition of government officials, leaders of the black community and human rights groups. In August of that year, Moseley-Braun and Matthews, without the knowledge of the Clinton Administration or the state department, visited the military dictator Sani Abacha, whose regime had been condemned for its human rights abuses and political corruption. To make matters worse, it was later shown that Matthews worked as a lobbyist for a beltway law firm which represented Nigeria.

By the time she came up for re-election in 1998, Moseley-Braun's star had fallen precipitously. Not only was her reputation tarnished by international scandal, but her staff was in shambles and her support in Illinois had waned. Over the course of her term she had had four chiefs of staff and three press secretaries. In addition to the allegations of sexual harassment against Matthews, one of her staff members claimed that Moseley-Braun had fired her after her maternity leave. At home, she faced heavy campaign debts. Voters outside of Chicago felt neglected by her. Moseley-Braun lost her Senate seat to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.

But her career in government was not over. After her defeat in the Senate race, President Bill Clinton nominated her to be the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand. In spite of fierce opposition from Helms and other conservatives, the Senate confirmed her nomination. Moseley-Braun served as an ambassador until the end of the Clinton Administration.

Given the controversy surrounding her senate years and her questionable position in the Democratic Party machine, many political observers believe that Moseley-Braun is a long-shot at best. While it is true that she may appeal to women voters and the African-American community, which until now has been supposed the province of Rev. Al Sharpton, she has little clout with other voting constituencies. Nor will her lack of expertise on national security issues help her bid. To complicate matters even further, in the four years since she left office her popularity and name recognition have decreased considerably. Consequently, of the Democratic hopefuls vying for the nomination, Moseley-Braun likely has one of the longest and most difficult paths to the White House.