"Something unusual is afoot when Pat Buchanan, the prominent “paleo-conservative”, waxes ecstatic about an African-American liberal. But US television viewers were not hallucinating when they heard him assess Barack Obama’s Denver acceptance speech late on Thursday.

“It was a genuinely outstanding speech,” said the man who was twice a contender to be the Republican presidential nominee. “It was magnificent ... This came out of the heart of America and it went right at the heart of America. It was beautiful.”

An even odder feeling may strike those who peruse the Facebook profile of Amy Petunia Politik, an organiser for Party Unity My Ass (Puma) – the diehard group of mostly female Hillary Clinton supporters, for whom nothing Mr Obama says can reconcile them to the former first lady’s defeat as the Democratic nominee.

Compared by one wit to the Japanese soldiers who remained holed up in Pacific islands after the second world war, Ms Politik told visitors to her online profile on Friday that she would “like all the trivial people, all the misogynists, and all of the messiah [Obama] supporters to delete me. Your shallowness gives me the creeps.”

Few, if any, Democratic conventions have generated as much passion or surprise as the crowning ceremony for Mr Obama that was brought to a close in a shower of confetti on Thursday night. Whether or not John McCain’s selection on Friday of Sarah Palin, the little-known governor of Alaska, will siphon off some disaffected Hillary supporters, it is unlikely to eclipse Mrs Clinton’s endorsement of Mr Obama.

The convention, which was sandwiched by Michelle Obama’s address on Monday and her husband’s on Thursday, was dominated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. From Mrs Clinton’s carefully stage-managed acclamation of her nemesis to her husband’s unexpectedly warm embrace of the man who had reportedly given him sleepless nights, nothing in Denver went quite as anticipated.

And nothing – except perhaps a hurricane striking Mr McCain’s convention in Minneapolis next week – is likely to upstage Denver’s political theatre for a long time to come. “I don’t recall any convention that has provided as outstanding oratory as this,” said James Carville, who managed Mr Clinton’s 1992 presidential bid. “It has been raised to a different level.” That was before he had heard Mr Obama’s Mile High Stadium speech. But Mr Obama’s address may not necessarily be the “game-changer” that some pundits immediately proclaimed.

The junior senator from Illinois went into the convention amid a welter of angst about his flat poll numbers and his inability to emulate Mrs Clinton’s connection with blue-collar households. Early polls suggest Mr Obama’s success in staving off the type of split that so hobbled Jimmy Carter in 1980 when Ted Kennedy strode unsmilingly off the stage (having failed properly to endorse him) may have restored his narrow lead over Mr McCain.

But this year’s polls have been surprisingly unresponsive to the frequent twists in the political narrative. Both candidates have been moving within the 40-50 per cent range since early June. It will only be early next week that pollsters will come up with the public’s reaction both to Mr Obama’s convention and Mr McCain’s unorthodox vice-presidential selection.

“The underlying numbers of this race are very stable – there aren’t any large swings,” says Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster. “My view is that this will continue to be the case emerging out of the Republican convention. This will remain a close race.” Each of the four days in Denver sent pundits scurrying in different directions. Day one, in which Mr Kennedy, who is suffering from a brain tumour, made a surprise appearance in a session that honoured his 46-year Senate career, was criticised by some as lacking in message. Michelle Obama did her best to knock her husband’s “elitist” tag on the head by hammering home his working-class origins. But her confidently delivered speech will be remembered more for the showbiz than the substance.

It was followed by a sentimental and transparently rehearsed exchange between the Obama children and their father, who was talking to them from a giant screen. “If there was a message here, the party did a hell of job hiding it,” Mr Carville told CNN.

Day two belonged to Mrs Clinton. Displaying a humour that had mostly been lacking during her dogged 16-month primary election fight, she “rocked the house”, in the words of Mr Obama. Her long farewell to the “sisterhood of travelling pantsuits”, as Mrs Clinton has dubbed her core voter support base, stretched into day three when she halted the ceremonial delegate floor vote just before her own state of New York was about to proclaim its tally.

In a move that left many attendees in tears, Mrs Clinton then announced her support for Mr Obama. “She was crowning him,” says an informal adviser to the Obama campaign. “If that was what kept her happy, I guess it was a small price to pay.”

While Mrs Clinton eclipsed everyone who had preceded her, she in turn was heavily eclipsed by her husband. In what was described by Robert Rubin, Mr Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, as the best speech of his career, the former president suppressed his wounded pride and offered Mr Obama the most emphatic endorsement he could have wished. Gone, at least for the time being, was the man who told ABC News earlier this month that he would hold off expressing his “strong [negative] feelings” about Mr Obama until after the general election.

That may still happen. But by then it will be academic. Delegates in the 20,000-capacity Pepsi convention centre stood rapt as Mr Clinton delivered an endorsement that some suspected had cost him a proverbial stomach ulcer. “Barack Obama is the man for this job,” he said. “His life is a 21st-century incarnation of the American dream. His achievements are proof of our continuing progress towards the ‘more perfect union’ of our founders’ dreams ... We see that humanity, that strength and our future in Barack and Michelle Obama and their beautiful children. If, like me, you still believe America must always be a place called Hope, then join Hillary, Chelsea and me in making Senator Barack Obama the next president of the United States.”

Only one thing could upstage Mr Clinton’s upstaging of Mrs Clinton. And that was Mr Obama’s acceptance speech before a championship crowd of 84,000. With queues stretching more than two miles and tickets that had been given away for free online going for several hundred dollars on the black market, nothing could better illustrate Mr McCain’s mockery of Mr Obama’s celebrity status.

Nothing, equally, could attest to the two candidates’ relative drawing power. The Republicans are having difficulty filling their convention hall next week. So far eight Republican senators have declined to attend.

In a uniquely positive advertisement Mr McCain put out a few hours before the rally, he congratulated Mr Obama on his achievement of being the first African-American nominee in the country’s history. And he commemorated the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.

“Senator Obama, this is truly a good day for America,” said Mr McCain in his first address to camera so far in the campaign. “Too often the achievements of our opponents go unnoticed. So I wanted to stop and say, ‘congratulations’. How perfect that your nomination would come on this historic day. Tomorrow, we’ll be back at it. But tonight, senator, job well done.”

Shortly afterwards Mr Obama stood up and delivered his most stinging attack on Mr McCain so far. In a sign that the Democratic nominee had taken on board the torrent of advice to sharpen his rhetoric and tone down the poetry, Mr Obama brought the stadium repeatedly to its feet at Mr McCain’s expense.

In a veiled reference to Mr McCain’s inability last week to recall how many houses he owns (his wife Cindy owns eight), Mr Obama said: “Now I don’t believe that Senator McCain doesn’t care what’s going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn’t know...”

Within minutes, Mr McCain’s campaign sent out the following statement. “Tonight, Americans witnessed a misleading speech that was so fundamentally at odds with the meagre record of Barack Obama,” it said. “When the temple comes down, the fireworks end, and the words are over . . . the fact remains Barack Obama is still not ready to be president.”

Next week Mr McCain will attempt to put flesh on that argument. But this week, at least, Mr Obama succeeded for the first time in looking plausibly presidential. He could not have done it without the Clintons." (Edward Luce, Financial Times, August 30, 2008)