“She asked me if I thought it would help in getting her people to support Obama, and I said I thought it would,” Mr. Engel recalled. “And then she said, ‘Tell the media.’”

With the primary over, Mrs. Clinton will be undertaking the process, vital to the Democratic Party, of moving her supporters into Barack Obama’s camp. She will also be undertaking the process, vital to her, of ensuring that everyone sees her doing it.

In terms of the political insiders in Mrs. Clinton’s orbit, people seem inclined to follow her now-harmonious lead.

As Mrs. Clinton’s elected supporters have continued to stream toward Mr. Obama, she has been making a series of private calls (confirmed publicly by her campaign) to her delegates urging them to do likewise.

And even before she officially ended her bid, her campaign staff had been making formal preparations for a merger with their Obama counterparts.

According to two former Clinton staffers, in the time between the last primaries on June 3 and the concession speech on June 7, communications director Howard Wolfson called staff members into his office to see who had the desire, and the energy, to work on the Obama campaign in the general election.

Mr. Wolfson, who couldn’t be reached for comment—he was taking a rare overseas vacation—then compiled those names and the résumés of Clinton staffers around the country into a list for delivery to the Obama campaign.

At the same time, key players in Mr. Obama’s fund-raising team have reached out to Mrs. Clinton’s top New York fund-raisers, including Alan Patricof, Hassan Nemazee, Maureen White, Steven Rattner and Jonathan Mantz. Mr. Mantz, who served as the Clinton campaign’s finance director, would be an especially significant acquisition for the Obama team, both because he was the one who actually organized the campaign’s top donors and because it would signal to Mrs. Clinton’s bundlers that the coast is officially clear for them to join the other team.

All of which is being met, at last, with vigorous nods of approval from party elders.

“Democrats have been out of power for eight years,” said Leon Panetta, the former White House chief of staff to Bill Clinton. “If you want to fall back on the kind of experience that’s going to be important in making policy decisions and in kind of understanding the nuances of what those decisions are, it’s not a bad idea to make use of that experience.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s official surrogates have reciprocated, showering Mrs. Clinton with praise since her gracious concession.

The question now is how long it will take—or even whether—the official displays of comity will trickle down to the voters.

Certainly, the dire polling data showing high numbers of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters unwilling to vote for Mr. Obama will settle. But the most committed of her loyalists may be slow to forgive what many of them genuinely saw as a chauvinistic joint effort of the Obama campaign and the media to bully their candidate from the race.

Much will also depend on how the vice presidential selection process plays out—watch for Mr. Obama to engage in a long and elaborate public courtship of the former first lady before he picks someone else—and on whether things go smoothly on the campaign trail as Mrs. Clinton is forced to muster enthusiasm for the young senator who beat her, over and over and over again.

Senator Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, who provided Mr. Obama one of his highest-profile endorsements during the primary, said, “Her speech went very far to help her supporters make that transition, but it is a work in progress. As with all campaigns that involve bringing sides together and creating unity, it doesn’t happen on one day or even with one speech, even a very effective speech like this. There is more work to do.”

He added, “Sometimes it takes your supporters longer to come together and heal than it does the candidates.”

To cite one small example: On June 8—the day after Mrs. Clinton’s speech in Washington—blogger and Clinton bundler Jill Iscol wrote the following e-mail to former New York State Democratic chair Judith Hope and more than a dozen other Clinton supporters: “the first among the many steps should be to support those who risked their own candidacies on hillary’s behalf. courageous leadership should be rewarded. and, i also believe the dnc needs to be held accountable for its stupid rules which cost hillary the nomination and negates the popular vote. we also need to figure out how to address the lack of leadership within our party when it came to standing up against the false accusations and attacks against both clintons by the media and the obama campaign.”

The feeling—even among those of Mrs. Clinton’s high-profile supporters who are inclined not to hold a grudge—remains that it is she who made the sacrifice in calling an end to the race for the nomination.

“She essentially tied,” said Ellen Moran, the executive director of Emily’s List, an influential political action committee that supports female Democratic candidates. “He had a few more delegates, she arguably had a few more popular votes, she fought this thing to a near draw, and she has handled herself in the aftermath of that completely gracefully; she gave what many of us thought was the speech of a lifetime on Saturday and was incredibly compelling.”

“She just lost a primary,” said Representative Louise Slaughter of New York. “She didn’t lose her stature.”

Ms. Moran and Ms. Slaughter said they expected Mrs. Clinton to campaign energetically for Mr. Obama at events through the summer and at the party’s convention in August.

But even just in terms of how valuable Mrs. Clinton’s help will be in the general election, there seems to be something of a divide between her supporters and those of Mr. Obama.

Artur Davis, a congressman from Alabama and one of Mr. Obama’s most vocal surrogates throughout the primary, said t
hat the nominee would certainly benefit from Mrs. Clinton’s help. But he also questioned whether she could deliver her primary voters to Mr. Obama even if she wanted to.

In Mr. Davis’ reckoning, there were left-leaning professionals who identified with Mrs. Clinton and passionately backed her—these women would never vote for a pro-life Republican anyway, he said—and more culturally conservative working-class women.

“I think she can help make the case to one cohort—I am not so convinced that she can help make the case to the other cohort because I am not so sure that cohort was voting for Hillary Clinton as much as they were voting against Barack Obama,” said Mr. Davis.

Here, by contrast, is what Mr. Engel said about Mrs. Clinton’s prospective ability to help her former opponent keep older voters, women voters, working-class white voters, and Jewish voters from defecting to John McCain or staying home: “Obama’s problem, as I see it, is, he’s generated tremendous turnout with young voters and African-Americans and all kinds of nontraditional voters, but at the same time, he has to be careful he doesn’t lose large chunks of the traditional Democratic vote. She helps him with that.”

And this: “I think if Obama is smart, he’d ask her to be his running mate. I think he would be making a big mistake if he didn’t. If he takes her, he wins the election. I think if he doesn’t take her, it’s a crap shoot.”

jbenson@observer.com; jhorowitz@observer.com