Michelle Obama offers olive branch to Clintons.

My God, the ability to give good speeches must run in the family. And, as she listed the many thing which make American great, she didn't forget to name Hillary Clinton for helping to "put those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling so that our daughters and sons can dream a little bigger and aim a little higher".

It won't be enough to satisfy the insane Hillary crowd despite the fact that Hillary is asking them to leave their disappointment behind and vote to help the poorest members of society.



They have their own agenda, and common sense is not part of it. So these supposed feminists will vote for a man who will apparently try to overturn Roe vs Wade.

Democratic apparatchiks are now wringing their hands that Mr Obama has yet to close the deal with millions of Democrats who did not support him in the primaries. A Gallup/USA Today poll revealed that only 47 per cent of Clinton supporters will back the Obama ticket, and that another 23 per cent say they may jump ship for the Republican, John McCain, or the independent Ralph Nader before the election.

I am simply at a loss as to how one deals with such irrational people, people who will put their own disappointments before the well being of millions of others.

People who would consider voting for an old war monger like John McCain, who would vote to continue the Iraq war - which they claim to be against - and would risk the lives of young men and women, simply to express their belief that they were somehow cheated, despite the fact that Obama was duly elected as part of a democratic process.

I sometimes wonder whether or not these people were ever Democrats at all. They are the strangest Democrats that I have ever come across.

And there are rumours that Bill and Hillary's staff are actually fuelling this discontent, and that they are making it clear that they are not happy at how she has been treated.

Some senior Obama supporters are irritated at how they perceive the Clintons fanned — or at a minimum failed to douse — stories that she was not even vetted as a possible vice presidential nominee. This is because she told Obama she preferred not to go through the rigorous process of document production unless she was really a serious contender, an Obama associate noted.

One senior Obama supporter said the Clinton associates negotiating on her behalf act like “Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific still fighting after the war is over.”

A prominent Obama backer said some of Clinton’s lieutentants negotiating with the Obama team are “bitter enders” who presume that, rather than the Clintons reconciling themselves to Obama’s victory, it is up to Obama to accommodate them.

In fact, some senior veterans of Clinton’s presidential campaign do believe this.

“He has not fully reconciled,” said one political operative close to the Clintons, “and he has not demonstrated that he accepts the Clintons and the Clinton wing of the party.

This is what I mean about finding these attitudes simply baffling. The Clinton wing of the party was defeated, they need to accept that defeat for the good of the entire Democratic movement.

In what world view does the winner need to reconcile himself to the loser? It is surely the losers job to reconcile themselves to their defeat? Michelle Obama last night threw down an olive branch, but that's not enough, apparently, for some Clintonites, who seem to want proof that the Clinton's still run the DNC.

They don't. They lost. And until they accept that simple fact I really have no idea how anyone is supposed to deal with them. Millions and millions of Americans need the Democrats to come through for them in November, there really is no room here for the egos of Hillary and Bill.

Booman does well to remind us of what this election is actually all about:

Ten, 20, 50, 100 years from now, Barack Obama's nomination in Denver -- and, should he win, his ascendency to the White House in November -- are what we will remember. Even though it's only one man, and most of our worst race problems in this country are institutional, it's a moment whose symbolic importance cannot be overstated. It's easy to ridicule Obama admirers (as both Clinton supporters and now McCain supporters have gleefully done) for the way in which Obama inspires many of his fans not by his policy pronouncements, but because of who he is -- not just as a person of color, but as someone who (unlike either Hillary, the president's wife, or McCain, the admiral's son) got where he is solely on his own considerable merits.

That he has gotten so far is a legacy that will inspire kids -- and not just African-American kids, but kids of all races -- for generations to come.

Let's bury the bloody hatchet and get on with making history.

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Tags: Obama, US election 2008, Clinton supporters, McCain