“Barack Obama is ready to be President of the United States”.

Not a very controversial statement for the thousands of Democrats gathered here in Denver. It is a phrase on the lips of most delegates and an already tired axiom from almost every speaker from the podium. But coming from one man, Bill Clinton, the words had a significance way beyond their rather prosaic meaning.

They were the words that Mr Clinton had famously failed to utter in an interview earlier this month. His reticence then reflected a simmering bitterness towards the candidate who had defeated his wife for the Democratic nomination. It was accompanied by stories from the Clinton camp that the former president was angry about the way he had been portrayed by the Obama campaign, and that he did not think the current Democratic leader had spoken warmly enough of Mr Clinton’s two terms in office.

And so there was almost palpable nervousness in the hours that preceded Bill Clinton’s address. While nobody in the end had really expected Hillary Clinton on Tuesday night to do anything other than throw her full support behind Senator Obama, you could never be sure about her husband.

It was unlikely he would say anything unsupportive, but how enthusiastic would he really be? Would he offer only rote endorsement of Senator Obama and choose to dwell instead on his wife’s virtues and his own achievements?

The answer on Wednesday night was dramatically clear. In his much awaited address to the convention, Mr Clinton delighted an ecstatic audience evidently hungry for a final reconciliation in a rift that has lurked beneath the surface all week.

There was no stinting, no equivocation, no to-be-carefully-parsed backhanded compliments.

Instead he delivered a rousing eulogy for Senator Obama, saying his life “is a 21st Century incarnation of the American Dream”. He had “a remarkable ability to inspire people… a clear grasp of our foreign policy and national security challenges …and a unique capacity to lead our increasingly diverse nation.” And of course he said Senator Obama was ready to be president.

In fact he paid the Democratic nominee the ultimate compliment: comparing him to the young Bill Clinton in 1992, attacked back then by Republicans as “too young and too inexperienced to be Commander-in-Chief.

“Sound familiar?” he asked the adoring crowd. “It didn’t work in 1992 because we were on the right side of history. And it won’t work in 2008 because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.”

The former president’s speech followed his wife’s appearance on the convention floor earlier in the day to interrupt the roll-call vote for presidential nominee and formally propose that Senator Obama be chosen by acclamation. Taken together the two interventions on Wednesday by the First Couple of Democratic politics were clearly intended to draw a line under the bitterness of the long primary campaign.

Mr Clinton’s rousing endorsement somewhat overshadowed what was supposed to be the centerpiece of the night’s events, the speech by Joe Biden accepting the vice-presidential nomination.

Senator Biden offered a deeply personal account of his candidacy, dwelling at length on his own working-class Irish Catholic roots in Pennsylvania, a useful narrative for the Democratic ticket given that Senator Obama has struggled to win the support of working class voters and Catholics in states such as Pennsylvania.

He then performed the traditional role of the vice-presidential nominee – attacking the opposition, with the help of the now very well-worn rhetorical device of inviting repeated chanted mantras from the audience.

A John McCain presidency would represent a continuation of the policies of the Bush administration, he said. After each charge in this indictment – on foreign policy, economics and energy, he led the crowd.“That’s not change” he said. “That’s more of the same” the audience would respond in antiphony.

It was a somewhat workmanlike performance by the vice-presidential nominee, enough to rouse Democrats and perhaps appeal to some voters tuning in for the speech on prime time television. But it was redeemed at least in part afterwards by a surprise appearance by the presidential candidate himself.

In any case it was always going to be less of an event than the former president’s oration.

Bill Clinton’s words on Wednesday night may not have fully closed the chapter on the feud that has churned Democratic party politics this year. As the campaign continues Mr and Mrs Clinton’s level of campaigning enthusiasm will be carefully watched. And if Senator Obama seems to be faltering you can be sure there will be well-sourced comments from people close to the Clintons that will bewail the fact that, as they once claimed, the young senator could not prevail in a general election.

But for now, the Democrats have had their catharsis.

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