Sen. Barack Obama is offering himself to the nation and the world as a young Jedi of bring-us-together negotiation and diplomacy. But if he expects to have a chance to use those skills on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and the Castro regime, he has to show he has the chops to pacify even tougher foes: Hillary and Bill Clinton.

As Obama grinds (not sprints) toward locking up the Democratic nomination, his next goal is clear: to make the Democrats’ Denver convention in late August a pageant of reconciliation. It’s got to be a revival meeting that blows the roof off the place.

Obama is not dealing from a position of great strength. He has been losing ground, slowly but significantly, in a number of polls, and he is going to need the Clintons.

Perhaps most galling to Obama supporters, that will mean giving the Clintons tons of air and stage time. Two mini-dramas will have to be in the script. There will have to be a raising up of Bill Clinton, in which he renounces his latest incarnation–suspender-snapping Southern mossback–and is welcomed back into the fold as the “first black president.”

The second drama will be Hillary’s. She will speak, of course, and it will be up to Obama let her say her piece. He will have to grin and bear it. Will she try to do what Sen. Ted Kennedy famously did to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 in New York–diminish her foe as she leaves the stage? Probably. Will Obama have a plan to deal with it? He had better. The way to do so is clear: have Kennedy himself, if he is up to it physically, follow Hillary.

As Arthur Miller said: attention must be paid.

Rather than running out of gas, the Clinton crusade in this last month has taken strength–and a growing sense of resentment–from the course of events. Current national polls give plenty of ammunition to Senator Clinton’s argument that she is the stronger candidate to face Sen. John McCain in the fall. She is running slightly ahead of Obama against McCain in the national horserace, and runs better than Obama in a number of key states right now–among them Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and West Virginia.

Obama is inching rather than roaring across the finish line, and his public standing has been nicked by any number of mini-controversies, the latest once again emanating from the dangerously YouTube-able pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Father Michael Pfleger’s outrageously racist sermon, in which he ridiculed Clinton in cruelly taunting terms, brought a swift but tepid rebuke from Obama. Obama and Pfleger are friends and allies–as the Clinton campaign reminded the world. In a new Pew poll, Obama has lost the significant edge he had over McCain among independents. Stories like this one are one reason why.

Clinton supporters have valid reasons to be angry at the world of politics, the national media included. Obama is the Newer New Thing, and for that sociological reason alone he has gotten a lot of cheerleaderlike coverage from the mainstream media.

The cheerleading is about to stop. Obama & Co. are going to have to get the cheers going again, and Denver is the place.

READ THE REST HERE.