In August 2000, a fresh-faced junior senator from Illinois turned up at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles to watch Al Gore officially accept the nomination to run for president against George W Bush.

Joe Biden and Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. Inset: Bill Clinton on the stage

But the eager political acolyte was turned away at the door. He didn’t have the right credentials to get in, nor did he have any influential buddies to pull strings for him. So he had to watch Gore on a television at the perimeter.

Eight years on, and Barack Obama has just had a national convention of his very own — one in which former president Bill Clinton stood on the stage and announced: “Barack Obama is ready to lead America and restore American leadership in the world. Ready to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Barack Obama is ready to be President of the United States”.

It was the resounding rallying-cry that the Democrats desperately wanted to hear from the man whose words still carry serious weight among large swathes of the party faithful.

But Bill went further, drawing direct comparisons between himself and the 47-year old senator from Illinois. “The Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander in chief. Sound familiar?” he asked the noisy, jubilant 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.”

It was a bravura performance by a grand master of political rhetoric, and he concluded with one final benediction, urging the audience to vote for his wife’s former opponent “if, like me, you still believe America must always be a place called Hope”.

Bill effectively did for the Democratic nominee what Ted Kennedy had done for him two nights earlier, when he proclaimed, “the hope rises again. And the dream lives on”. Both party grandees, each in their own way, claimed Barack as his successor.

Ever since last January when Ted Kennedy stood in Washington and declared his support for the young upstart over then clear frontrunner Hillary Clinton, the race turned into a power struggle between the two royal houses of the Democratic Party.

Such was the intensity of the Kennedy/Clinton contest that until Barack Obama made his surprise appearance at the Pepsi Centre in Denver on the eve of his speech, the first three days of the convention focused more on the party’s two rival factions than on its chosen nominee for the White House.

And yet almost unnoticed, there were other clan members making their speeches in quiet corners of Denver. On Wednesday, a clatter of Kennedy's hosted a fundraiser for the RFK Memorial, which advocates the human rights movement, in the city’s oldest and most gracious hotel, The Brown Palace.

Various members of the family lined up to greet guests. From Ethel, the widow of Bobby Kennedy and the matriarch of the family, Robert Junior, Joe Courtney, and Patrick, son of Ted, to hordes of startlingly gorgeous children and grandchildren.

Environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy junior was taking part in various conferences on climate change and related topics during convention week.

But when he stepped up to the microphone on Wednesday, it was to talk about his father, who was assassinated when he was nine years old.

“I went on a trip to Europe with my father and mother,” he recalled. “And everywhere we went we were met by vast crowds of people, hundreds of thousands of people who came out into the street because they wanted to be near to an American politician. And it wasn’t because his brother had been martyred three years before,” he continued.

“Our nation was the most loved nation on the face of the earth, because we were regarded as an exemplary nation.

“It took 230 years of discipline, restraint and visionary leadership by Republican and Democratic presidents to build up those vast reservoirs of love and adoration for the United States. For the past seven years, through monumental arrogance and incompetence we have drained those reservoirs dry. Anyone who thinks it’s good for our country when Hezbollah is more popular in the Middle East than the US has their head in an oil-well,” he declared.

It was a mesmerising and persuasive speech, delivered over the chatter of the well-heeled crowd, some of whom listened, some who did not. But it was an address which was better than most of those given at the Pepsi Convention Centre that week.

Until recently, Bobby Junior has refused to take up the torch that was extinguished by his father’s assassination in 1967, but recently he started moving towards the light of political office.

Last year he endorsed Hillary Clinton for the nomination, and hinted that he would run for the Senate if she won.

The Clintons and Kennedy's are united behind Barack Obama for now. His rapid progress from Los Angeles to Denver has been remarkable as Bill Clinton affirmed, “his life has been the 21st century incarnation of the American Dream”.

But sometimes torches can burn those to whom they are passed. If Obama falters in November, he might look out from centre stage and see some familiar faces waiting impatiently on the perimeter.