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Janet Napolitano first came to Washington 17 years ago as part of the legal team that represented Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings.

Hill’s sordid testimony about sexual harassment may not have torpedoed Thomas’ career; still, Napolitano attracted notice as a smart, young Democrat who was going places. “Meet the PCTC, a post Clarence Thomas Candidate,” wrote syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, who urged her to challenge John McCain for his Senate seat.

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A short time later, Napolitano was tapped by Bill Clinton to be U.S. attorney for Arizona, enabling her to cultivate the law-and-order creds to launch her political career. Five years later, she ran for, and won, the state attorney general’s job, and, in 2002, was elected Arizona’s third female governor.

Today, the popular Democratic governor in a Republican-leaning state is said to be the top candidate for Homeland Security secretary under President-elect Barack Obama, whom she endorsed early in the primaries despite her ties to the Clintons.

Admirers describe the 50-year-old breast cancer survivor as a shrewd politician and problem solver, who is quick to size up people and issues. In 2005, Time Magazine called her one of America’s five best governors.

“Positioning herself as a no-nonsense, pro-business centrist, she has worked outside party lines since coming to office in January 2003 to re-energize a state that, under her predecessors, was marked by recession and scandal.”

By most accounts, Napolitano has navigated a centrist path on immigration issues in Arizona, which shares a 376-mile border with Mexico and where anti-immigrant fervor runs high.

During her first term, she sent National Guardsmen to the border – and forwarded the bill to the federal government. The policy of enlisting the Guard was later adopted by the Bush administration.

Last year, she signed into law the nation’s harshest penalty for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, a measure that would take away their business licenses for a second violation.

But Napolitano has also vetoed more extreme measures, for instance, a bill that would have made it a crime for day laborers to look for work on public streets. Earlier this year, she also yanked $1.6 million in state funds that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio had used to conduct roving immigration raids in the Latino community.

For critics, though, that action was too little, too late.

“My own conclusion is simple,” wrote Alfredo Gutierrez, a onetime Democratic rival sizing her up for homeland security secretary in La Frontera Times. “She’s a tough, smart, competent, ambitious law enforcement officer, a fundamentally moderate Democrat, who is willing to throw immigrants under the bus only when necessary.”

But Doris Meissner, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Clinton administration who is now at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, said Napolitano “would be an excellent choice” for Homeland Security.

“She has impeccable law-enforcement and leadership credentials,” Meissner told the Washington Independent. “And as a border-state governor, she has direct knowledge and experience of how our broken immigration system is affecting her state and the nation.”

Born in New York City in 1957, Napolitano grew up in Albuquerque, where her father was dean of the University of New Mexico Medical School. In high school, she was voted most likely to succeed.

After majoring in political science at her father’s alma mater, Santa Clara University in California, and attending the University of Virginia School of Law, she clerked for an appellate court judge in Arizona, and then landed a job at Lewis & Roca, a well-regarded Phoenix law firm with strong Democratic ties.

The firm got a call from Sen. Dennis DeConcini, an Arizona Democrat, in October, 1991, asking if it would represent Anita Hill, and Napolitano was put in charge of preparing the testimonies of Hill’s supporting witnesses.

Asked in an interview recently whether she considered herself a feminist, writer Dana Goldstein described how Napolitano looked down at her hands and said, “I just consider myself Janet.”

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