June 7, 2008 Hillary Clinton ends her historic quest to become the first female president. In a speech in Washington, she tells her supporters to unite behind former rival Barack Obama. June 3, 2008 The Democratic primary season ends with contests in Montana and South Dakota. Clinton wins the South Dakota primary, but Obama secures enough delegates to claim the nomination.



May 31, 2008 The Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee decides to give only half-votes to delegates from Michigan and Florida. Both states held unsanctioned primaries, which Clinton won. The move dashes Clinton's hope that a rule change would help her close the delegate gap with Obama. More

May 23, 2008 Clinton explains why she remains in the race by telling the editorial board of the South Dakota Argus Leader that primary contests have often extended into June. She mentions her husband's 1992 campaign and then adds, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California." The comments spark a firestorm. More

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May 20, 2008 Clinton wins a lopsided victory in Kentucky, bolstering her claims that Obama cannot appeal to white working-class voters. Nonetheless, Obama wins in Oregon and secures an absolute majority among pledged delegates. More

May 13, 2008 Clinton wins the West Virginia primary by 41 points, her largest victory other than Arkansas. Her delegate gain does not make a significant dent in Obama’s overall lead. In her victory speech, Clinton vows to fight on. More

May 11, 2008 Obama takes the lead in the superdelegate count, which Clinton once led by nearly 100.

Top May 8, 2008 In an interview with USA Today, Clinton says that “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans is weakening.” She later tells CNN it was a dumb thing to say. May 7, 2008 George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972, switches his support from Clinton to Obama and calls for Clinton to drop out of the race. More

May 6, 2008 North Carolina and Indiana hold primaries. Clinton wins Indiana by a disappointing 2 percentage points, but loses North Carolina by 14 points, leaving her with a near-insurmountable delegate deficit. MSNBC’s Tim Russert says, "We now know who the Democratic nominee will be.” More

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May 5, 2008 The Clinton campaign begins arguing that the number of delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination is 2,209 (not 2,025) – a majority of convention delegates, including full voting representation from Michigan and Florida. May 5, 2008 Clinton loans her campaign $425,000. More

May 1, 2008 Clinton loans her campaign $1 million.

Top April 30, 2008 Clinton backs Republican Sen. John McCain’s proposal to suspend the federal gas tax during the peak summer driving season. Obama calls the proposal a “gimmick.” More

April 29, 2008 Clinton tells ABC’s Good Morning America that the U.S. could “totally obliterate” Iran if that country launched an attack on Israel. More

April 22, 2008 Clinton wins the Pennsylvania primary by more than 9 percentage points, bolstering her argument that Obama has trouble appealing to working-class white voters. In the 24 hours after the victory, the Clinton campaign raises $10 million. More

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April 11, 2008 Clinton loans her campaign $5 million. April 6, 2008 Clinton campaign pollster and chief strategist Mark Penn is demoted; Geoff Garin is his replacement. More

March 25, 2008 A student at a town hall meeting in Indianapolis asks Chelsea Clinton whether the Monica Lewinsky scandal hurt her mother’s credibility. Chelsea responds, “I do not think that is any of your business.”

Top March 24, 2008 CBS News releases archival video of the 1996 welcoming ceremony for then-First Lady Clinton in Tuzla, Boznia. On the campaign trail, Clinton had recalled landing “under sniper fire” and running “with our heads down” to the transport vehicles. But the CBS video shows Clinton receiving flowers from a child on the tarmac. March 20, 2008 The Michigan state Senate announces it will not approve a re-vote. March 19, 2008 The National Archives releases more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s schedules from her years as first lady. The documents don’t provide much insight into the substance of Clinton’s White House role, but do show her lobbying on behalf of NAFTA – a policy she criticizes on the campaign trail. More

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March 18, 2008 The Florida Democratic Party says there’s no chance of a re-vote there. March 7, 2008 Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984 and a member of Clinton's finance committee, tells a California newspaper that Obama “would not be in this position” if he were white or a woman. The remarks go unnoticed for several days, then prompt a firestorm. Ferraro stands by her words but eventually resigns from the campaign. More

March 5, 2008 Clinton’s campaign reveals that the senator loaned her campaign $5 million in February.

Top March 4, 2008 Clinton breaks her losing streak with crucial primary wins in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas (but Obama nets more delegates from Texas due to the hybrid primary-caucus system). Obama wins Vermont. More

Feb. 29, 2008 The Clinton campaign releases an ad called “Children,” also known as the “3 a.m. phone call” ad. Feb. 27, 2008 Georgia Rep. John Lewis, a leader in the 1960s civil rights movement, switches his support from longtime friend Clinton to Obama, saying, "Sometimes you have to be on the right side of history.” More

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Feb. 23, 2008 Saturday Night Live returns from the writers’ strike with a political debate sketch skewering the media’s perceived preferential treatment of Obama. More



Feb. 20, 2008 At a campaign stop in Texas, Bill Clinton tells the audience that Hillary must win Texas and Ohio to stay in the running for the Democratic nomination. More

Feb. 10, 2008 Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle resigns. She is replaced by longtime Clinton aide Maggie Williams. More

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Feb. 9, 2008 Obama wins contests in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington state, and the Virgin Islands and opens up a lead in the pledged delegate race. Clinton begins an 11-contest losing streak that will last through the month of February. Feb. 5, 2008 Twenty-two states and American Samoa hold Democratic contests. The results are inconclusive: Obama wins more states, but Clinton wins more popular votes and nets a handful more delegates. The race goes on. More

Jan. 29, 2008 Hillary Clinton wins the Florida primary by 17 points. Like Michigan, the state defied party rules and scheduled its primary before Feb. 5 – and like Michigan, no candidates campaigned there. Unlike Michigan, all the candidates are on the ballot. Clinton holds a rally outside Ft. Lauderdale shortly after the polls close.

Top Jan. 26, 2008 Bill Clinton minimizes Obama’s South Carolina victory, pointing out that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88.” The comment strikes another blow to the Clintons’ popularity in the black community. Jan. 26, 2008 Obama wins the South Carolina primary by 30 points. This is the first contest in a state with a significant black population, and exit polls estimate that Obama receives more than 80 percent of the black vote. More Jan. 25, 2008 The New York Times endorses Clinton in the New York primary. More

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Jan. 19, 2008 Clinton wins more support in the Nevada caucuses, but because of the way delegates are apportioned geographically, Obama nets one more delegate. More

Jan. 15, 2008 Clinton wins the Michigan primary, a state stripped of its delegates as punishment for moving its primary up to January. No one campaigns there, and Obama’s name is not on the ballot. Jan. 13, 2008 BET founder Bob Johnson introduces Clinton in Columbia, S.C. He says the Clintons were “involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that -- I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.” The statement is perceived as another shot at Obama’s high school experimentation with drugs. Johnson makes various excuses before eventually apologizing to Obama.

Top Jan. 8, 2008 Clinton beats expectations (and defies 8-point polling deficits), winning the New Hampshire primary by 3 points. Many pundits credit the teary moment in Portsmouth and the “hurt feelings” line from the debate with rallying women voters back to Clinton’s side. In her victory speech, Clinton announces, “I’ve found my voice.” More

Jan. 7, 2008 Bill Clinton, speaking at a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, calls Obama’s claim that he had better judgment on Iraq than Sen. Clinton did “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” The remark is widely misinterpreted to refer to the Obama candidacy as a whole, not just the Iraq issue. More hackles go up among African-American voters. More

Jan. 7, 2008 Clinton tells Fox News that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream couldn’t have been realized without Lyndon Johnson passing the Civil Rights Act, saying, “It took a president to get it done.” Collective eyebrows are raised, especially in the black community.

Top Jan. 7, 2008 A participant in a roundtable discussion at a Portsmouth, N.H., coffee shop asks Clinton how she keeps herself so pulled-together on the campaign trail. Clinton’s emotional response receives a flurry of attention as the media speculates on whether the moment will help or hurt Clinton in the next day’s primary. More

Jan. 5, 2008 At the New Hampshire ABC/WMUR debate, moderator Scott Spradling asks Clinton why voters seem to like Obama more. She responds, “Well, that hurts my feelings.” Obama chimes in, “You’re likeable enough, Hillary,” a response widely criticized as condescending. Jan. 3, 2008 Clinton places a surprising third in the Iowa caucuses, behind Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

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Dec. 29, 2007 The Concord Monitor endorses Clinton ahead of the Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary. Dec. 16, 2007 Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska governor and senator and current president of the New School in New York, “enthusiastically and unequivocally” endorses Clinton. But he notes in his remarks that he likes “Barack Hussein Obama’s” Muslim heritage. Some Obama supporters accuse Kerrey of smear tactics. More

Dec. 15, 2007 The Des Moines Register endorses Clinton in the Jan. 3 Iowa Democratic caucuses. More

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Dec. 12, 2007 Clinton New Hampshire Campaign Co-Chair Billy Shaheen tells a reporter that if Obama is the Democratic nominee, Republicans will exploit his self-admitted youthful experimentation with drugs and alcohol. Shaheen resigns from the campaign the next day, and Clinton personally apologizes to Obama, saying that negative personal attacks are not part of her campaign. Dec. 2, 2007 The Clinton campaign issues a “fact-check” of Obama’s stump speech line that he’s not running for president because of long-held ambitions. It cites an essay he wrote in kindergarten titled, “I Want to Become President.” Following snickers from the news media, the Clinton campaign subsequently claims it was kidding. Nov. 30, 2007 A man claiming to have a bomb takes three campaign workers hostage at the Clinton campaign office in Rochester, N.H. After several hours, the standoff ends peacefully. More

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Nov. 26, 2007 Clinton tells CBS’ Katie Couric that she will be the Democratic nominee, and that the nomination will be sewn up by midnight on Feb. 5, 2008 (Super Tuesday). Nov. 9, 2007 The Grinnell College student newspaper reports that Clinton campaign aides coached a Grinnell student about what to ask the New York senator at an Iowa town hall meeting. More

Oct. 30, 2007 At a debate in Philadelphia hosted by MSNBC, Clinton gives a contradictory answer about then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants to have drivers’ licenses. The other candidates pounce on Clinton, accusing her of inconsistency. More

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Sept. 17, 2007 Clinton unveils her “American Health Choices Plan,” which includes a so-called “individual mandate,” requiring every American to have health insurance coverage. More

Sept. 6, 2007 Clinton campaign “bundler” Norman Hsu is arrested by the FBI in Grand Junction, Colo., after getting sick on a Chicago-bound train. Hsu had jumped bail after surrendering at a California courthouse. He was still wanted for failing to appear at a sentencing hearing after his 1992 fraud conviction. More recently, Hsu had been laundering sizeable Democratic campaign donations through the family of a San Francisco postal worker, a story first reported in The Wall Street Journal. More

Aug. 4, 2007 Clinton participates in the progressive bloggers’ conference Yearly Kos. The crowd boos when she says that lobbyists, “whether you like it or not, represent real Americans.” More

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July 2, 2007 Bill Clinton begins a campaign swing through Iowa with his wife. It’s the couple’s first series of appearances together on the trail. More

June 30, 2007 End of the second quarter of 2007. Clinton raises $21 million, but Obama outpaces her with a $31 million haul. He stays ahead of her in fundraising for the remainder of the campaign. More

June 19, 2007 Clinton announces the winner of the online voting for her campaign’s theme song: “You and I” by Celine Dion. The announcement video is a spoof of the series finale of HBO's The Sopranos.

Top Early June, 2007 Two biographies of Clinton are published: A Woman In Charge, by Carl Bernstein, and Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. More

May 23, 2007 A leaked internal memo urging Clinton to skip the Iowa caucuses generates Internet and media buzz. The campaign disavows the strategy and states that Clinton is “unequivocally committed to competing in Iowa.” March 31, 2007 End of the first quarter of 2007. Clinton’s campaign raises $36.1 million in the first three months of the year -- nine months before any primaries or caucuses.

Top March 5, 2007 “Vote Different,” a mash-up of Apple’s famous “1984” ad – this time featuring Clinton as Big Brother – appears on YouTube and quickly goes viral. The Huffington Post later outs Philip de Vellis, an Ohio Democratic strategist, as the video’s creator. March 4, 2007 Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama march in Selma, Ala., commemorating the 1965 voting rights protest that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Both candidates give speeches at local churches. Despite polls at the time showing divided support among the black community, the crowd is much larger at Obama’s speech. More

Jan. 20, 2007 Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her candidacy via an Internet video. She says she’s “beginning a conversation with you, with America.”

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