America/Conor O'Clery:Forget the Democratic Party National Convention in Boston in July.The real convention took place on Thursday evening in Washington's National Building Museum where former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, former vice-president Al Gore and all 10 primary candidates except Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun gathered for a huge unity dinner to embrace John Kerry as their new chief.
They were given a rapturous reception when they assembled on stage in suits and red power ties - except for Al Sharpton who thought it was a black-tie dinner - and clenched hands together high in the air.
Forgotten for the evening were the campaign digs by Sharpton at Howard Dean, the charges by the former Vermont governor that Kerry was a hopeless Washington insider and the scorn that Dean once heaped on the party establishment.
This was a "Get Bush Out" unity rally where bad feelings from the campaign were put aside, and even Al Gore and his estranged former running mate, Joe Lieberman, gamely embraced.
Bill Clinton got a rapturous reception for a speech in which he extolled Kerry as a "good man" whom the Republicans would try to turn into a cartoon figure.
"We're so united that the Democratic leadership is giving a lifetime membership to Howard Dean," announced former Texas governor Ann Richards, tongue in cheek. "We're so united that Joe Lieberman and Al Sharpton are on their way to San Francisco for a marriage licence."
Richards thanked the two Republicans whom the Democrats love to hate, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, for "working so hard to bring our party together". The dinner raised $11 million for the Democratic Party, which chairman Terry McAuliffe announced was debt-free and had $25 million in the bank.
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Al Franken was everywhere during the Democratic contests, turning up at campaign rallies in New Hampshire and Iowa.
You couldn't fail to notice the loud, rumpled, bespectacled figure in a crowd, which may explain why he was picked out instead of me for a random security check at Des Moines Airport.
He physically brought down a heckler at a Manchester, New Hampshire, event for Howard Dean and had to borrow duct-tape from RTE's Carol Coleman to fix his broken spectacles. (The mayor of Manchester later proclaimed a special Al Franken day to commemorate the flying tackle).
The 52-year-old author of the anti-right best-sellers, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot is about to become much better known across America.
On Wednesday he will begin hosting a three-hour talk show on a new liberal radio network, Air America Radio, the left's response to right-wing hosts like Limbaugh (weekly audience 15 million) and Michael Savage ("Richard Clarke is a Judas").
Air America will be relying on Franken's biting wit, cheerfulness and political passion to draw a big audience. In a rehearsal he gleefully played for a Newsweek reporter an audio of Donald Rumsfeld denying that Bush officials had ever said Saddam was an "immediate threat", followed by his spluttering reaction when shown a transcript proving he used the phrase himself.
Franken will have imaginary characters on the show, one of whom, alas, is to be called Liam the Loose-Boweled Leprechaun.
He will be heard in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. Only if the show is a hit there will it be extended to "fly-over country" to challenge Limbaugh et al on their own terrain.
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The laughs at the Radio and Television Correspondents' annual dinner in Washington on Wednesday were provided by George Bush, assuming the role of Entertainer in Chief.
Mr Bush put on a self-mocking slide-show called the "White House Election-Year Album". One slide showed him doing a contorted shuffle in front of Condoleezza Rice, about which he commented: "Here I am trying to explain John Kerry's foreign policy."
He staged a scene where North Korea's Kim Jong-il telephoned John Kerry to say: "Hey, John, just wanted to let you know you're my guy."
But self-deprecating humour can sometime backfire. One slide showed Bush looking under furniture and saying: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere . . . Nope, no weapons over there . . . Maybe under here . . ." Some people didn't think this was funny.
Senator Kerry issued a statement saying: "If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought.
"Unfortunately for the President, this is not a joke; 585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded, and there's no end in sight."
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Unfortunately for John Kerry his opponents have long memories and good Internet search engines. Within hours they were recalling that in 1988 Kerry was overheard telling an anecdote about the first president George Bush and his not-so-bright vice-president. If someone shot the president, they were instructed, they immediately had to shoot Dan Quayle.