Barack Obama has already made history, regardless of the outcome of the presidential election in November. On the 45th anniversary of the day that Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I had a dream" speech and outlined his vision of an America stripped of racism and inequality, Obama - child of a white woman and a Kenyan man - will become the first African-American to be nominated as a candidate for the presidency.

Yet, as the 46-year-old senator stood before 70,000 supporters in the Invesco stadium in Denver last Thursday, on a stage decorated to suggest the stateliness of a Washington building, to accept his party's nomination, it was not the historic moment that he chose to highlight.

Instead, the senator stressed his ordinariness, not his extraordinariness. It was about his Americanness and his humble roots, not his exotic international background. It was about his connection with people, not the fact that he has, against the odds, triumphed, gone to Harvard, been an academic, become a US senator, and now, four years later, stands on the cusp of the most powerful job in the world.

"We want to open up this convention to make sure that everybody that wants to come can join in the party and join in the effort to take America back," he said.

This week in Denver was about two things for the Democratic Party.

The first was an internal message of healing aimed at the party faithful who are gathered in Colorado or who are glued to CNN watching proceedings.

The second one, though, is far more important for Obama.

It is aimed not at the die-hard Democrats but the waverers, the doubters, the disengaged and those disinclined to vote at all. And to be blunt, it is about addressing the latent racism that still lurks in parts of American society.

It is this: ignore the colour of my skin, I am a man who shares your love of family, God and country and who, with my running mate, Joe Biden, is ready to lead.

The drama of the convention has tended to highlight the first message.

No one could fault the diminutive woman in a burnt-orange pantsuit on the large stage of the Pepsi Centre on Tuesday night. As Hillary Clinton delivered her speech to the 4000 delegates and thousands of supporters, there was no hesitation, no reservation in her endorsement of her rival for the nomination. "Whether you voted for me or voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose," she said as her voice rang out strongly over a sea of mesmerised faces, waving white placards with her trademark Hillary signature.

On Wednesday she provided a true moment of drama.

The roll call of the states, in which each casts its votes for the candidates, was a dramatic demonstration that even after days of cajoling at least 10-20 per cent of Hillary loyalists just could not stomach voting for Obama.

Like a goddess in a Grecian play, Clinton suddenly appeared in a pool of light surrounded by her retinue of Secret Service agents.

In a firm, clear voice she explained to the mortals it was time for unity and then personally moved Obama's nomination amid cheering that drowned out any further discontent. The relief in the huge stadium was palpable.

Then later that day it was Bill Clinton's turn. It is an open secret in the party that the former president had struggled to come to term with his wife's defeat at the hands of a relative political newcomer.

Not only does he genuinely believe his wife was the better candidate, but he has deep reservations about Obama's electability. He is also deeply scarred by events in South Carolina during the primaries in which, he believes the Obama camp deliberately and unfairly painted him as a racist, when he downplayed Obama's likely win there.

On Wednesday night it was clear that the party faithful were ready to forgive him any churlishness as they welcomed him onto the stage with three minutes of cheers and applause that even he could not curtail.

Clinton did not disappoint them either, giving a whole-hearted endorsement of Obama, talking of his readiness to lead and his great ability to inspire people.

"The Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief," he said. "Sound familiar?

"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," he said to wild cheering.

But while the former president did and said everything that was required of him, his praise of Obama was somehow impersonal.

"I lurrv Joe Biden and America will too," Clinton drawled at the start of his speech.

On Obama though, the best Bill Clinton could muster was "a remarkable ability to inspire, to raise our hope and rally us to a higher purpose. Obama has the intelligence and curiosity every successful president needs."

An important part of the healing process has also been a public exchange of compliments between the two most prominent women in this campaign.

Michelle Obama, who can be blunt to a fault, gave interviews during the primaries in which she bluntly accused the Clintons of having a misplaced sense of entitlement and of being the embodiment of "old Washington politics."

On Monday night though, she went out of her way to praise people of conviction "like Hillary Clinton who 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."

On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton returned the compliment, saying Obama had a "terrific partner" in Michelle Obama. "Anyone who saw Michelle's speech last night knows she will be a great first lady for America."

Will all the backslapping work?

Just before the convention, a Gallup/ USA Today poll showed that only 47 per cent of Clinton supporters would definitely vote for Obama. A further 23 per cent said they supported him but may change their minds and 30 per cent say they will either vote for the Republican candidate, John McCain, or stay home.

As Clinton put it, supporters will now need to ask: were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?

But the longer-term message which Obama hopes to send from this convention is to introduce himself to millions of American voters and reassure them that he is not to be feared or doubted, that he is like them but also ready to take on the biggest job in the world.

He needs to scrape off some of the mud that has stuck in recent weeks thanks to a concerted negative campaign by the Republicans.

In a country where branding a person "French" is a serious insult, Obama's recent trip to Europe has been deftly turned against him as proof that he is elitist, an internationalist not a patriot, and more subliminally a high-taxing socialist - just like those French.

A television commercial funded by the American Issues Project - an organisation with just one donor, the Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, who made his first fortune with a chain of pharmacies - tries to link Obama to terrorism. The advertisement highlights his friendship with former Weatherman Underground member Williams Ayers, who knows Obama from Chicago.

Simmons also funded the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, an organisation that ran ads impugning the service record of the 2004 Democratic nominee and Vietnam hero, John Kerry - ads that subsequently proved to be untrue.

Campaign surrogates have also stepped up the attacks. The former Massachusetts governor and failed Republican candidate Mitt Romney was in Denver this week, to launch a series of attacks on Obama's readiness to be leader.

"Barack Obama is a fine person, but I don't think he is ready to be president," he said.

"I don't think he has the judgment, which is developed through years of experience in life, that prepares him for assuming the title of president of the United States and commanding the most powerful military and guiding the most powerful economy."

But there are deeper concerns that Obama needs to address.

There was a reason that his campaign headquarters was so upset by The New Yorker cover portraying Obama as a Muslim and Michelle as a fist-bumping, gun-toting commando chick.

The latest survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press in June found that 12 per cent of Americans say Obama is a Muslim, virtually unchanged from 10 per cent in March.

  This misperception is not limited to voters who oppose Obama. Identical percentages of Republicans and Democrats think he is Muslim, and the link between views of Obama's religion and their candidate choice vote is strongest among Democrats, Pew said.

But the effect may be deeper than just the misguided 12 per cent.

One-quarter of voters say they don't know what Obama's religious beliefs are, including 10 per cent who say it's not because they just don't know enough about him, rather that they have doubts.

It seems extraordinary after the ballyhoo over Obama's (Christian) preacher Jeremiah Wright, but this vacuum of knowledge is one of the central things Obama has sought to fill this week - before the Republicans do it for him.

The job mainly fell to Michelle Obama who spoke eloquently of her life story growing up in humble circumstances on the South Side of Chicago, while stressing the personal attributes and values of her husband as a father and family man.

"The Barack Obama I know today is the same man I fell in love with 19 years ago. He's the same man who drove me and our new baby home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along at a snail's pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he's struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father's love," she told the convention on Monday.

On Wednesday the Obama camp unveiled the other big gun in their strategy: a vice-presidential choice that will help shore up the vote among white working-class men, Catholics and those who have reservations about Obama's lack of experience.

Joe Biden may be a five-term senator and arguably a Washington insider, but he has an easy common touch about him, and a connection to ordinary people that Obama still struggles to achieve.

As one commentator put it: "In politics you want to put the jelly jar on the lowest shelf."

Biden provides that sort of easy access for older white voters who were struggling to relate to Obama's theme of change.

Biden also has a compelling personal story. As his son, Beau, recounted in his introduction for his father, the family was rocked by tragedy just after Biden was first elected to the senate.

Joe's wife and baby daughter were killed in a car accident and his two small sons gravely injured. As Beau described his father agonising over whether to continue with a political career at his sons' bedsides, the tears flowed freely in the Pepsi Centre.

After the accident, Joe Biden told delegates that his mother counselled him: "God sends no cross you cannot bear."

More tears flowed. It was impossible not to marvel at the courage and substance of a man who could rebuild his life after such tragedy.

But Biden brings much more: a huge Catholic family, expertise on foreign affairs and an ability to attack his opponents with a smile and a joke.

Like this supposedly fluffed line on Wednesday as he berated George Bush for the legacy he had left: "That's the future if George - excuse me - John McCain is elected."

Now Obama has the attack dog he needs.

It also won't hurt that Beau Biden, the Delaware attorney-general and a member of the state's National Guard, has been called up and will be deployed to Iraq by the end of the year.

The early news out of the Democratic Convention even before Obama spoke was positive.

The TV ratings for the convention have smashed all records. Some 24 million viewers tuned into Michelle Obama's speech; 26 million a day tuned in for Hillary, five times the number of people who watched the corresponding day of the convention in 2004. The ratings for Obama's acceptance speech were expected to be stratospheric.

America, it seems is interested and listening. And it seems they are responding too.

Obama's early lead in the national polls had dwindled since the European trip a month ago leaving him in a statistical tie with McCain and struggling to hold his early leads in the big battleground states.

On Thursday, a Gallup tracking poll taken from Monday to Wednesday showed Obama ahead 48 per cent to 42 per cent. He had also rebounded in the battleground state of Florida according to a Mason-Dixon poll taken since the convention began

But there are still many weeks to go until the election and from today onwards, the Republicans steal the spotlight as they unveil their vice-presidential candidate and begin their own convention in St Paul, Minnesota, on Monday.