NEW YORK - Following a brutal bout for the Democratic nomination, after a summer filled with whispers about an Obama/Clinton feud, and more than three months after Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential ambitions, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton finally met face to face.

Obama, in town for the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, spent more than two hours inside Bill Clinton’s Harlem office building. In a joint Clinton-Obama statement sent to reporters by the Obama campaign, the conversation was described as “great” and the two discussed the campaign only briefly during the meeting, mostly talking “about how the world has changed since September 11, 2001.”

The statement continued, “Sen. Obama praised the work of the Clinton Foundation around the world and President Clinton applauded Sen. Obama’s historic campaign which has inspired millions around the country. They also spoke about what the next President can do to help make the economy work for all Americans, as it did under President Clinton, and ensure safety and prosperity far beyond the coming the election. President Clinton said he looks forward to campaigning for Senator Obama later this month.”

Prior to their private meeting, Obama’s press pool were permitted inside for a quick photo-op and a couple of questions. President Clinton told the small group of reporters that he would hit the campaign trail for Obama after his Global Initiative is over at the end of the month and that he’s agreed to “a substantial number of things” to help out.

“We’re putting him to work,” Obama joked.

When asked if he thought the race was “too close for comfort,” Clinton predicted Obama “will win and will win pretty handily.”

“There you go, you can take it from the President of the United States - he knows a little something about politics,” Obama chimed in.

While the photo-op is a happy read, according to the pool report, “There was no handshake and your pooler did not see the two actually look at each other.”

Presumably the two did, in fact, make eye contact during their private discussion over Cosi sandwiches, flatbread pizza, and salad.

While Barack Obama delivered a barn-burning speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta — where Martin Luther King once presided over the congregation — Hillary Clinton commemorated Dr King’s upcoming holiday with muted remarks at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

She was in the neighborhood to pick up the endorsement of the church’s influential pastor, Rev Dr Calvin Butts III, who echoed the campaign’s case for her candidacy. “The rhetoric of change in which we are presently engaged must also be accompanied by the experience and ability necessary to succesfully and resourcefully accomplish it,” he said.

Butts said he’d received a number of calls wondering why he would support a white woman over a black man. “This was not and is not and will not become a race-based decision for me,” he said, “and I hope that it has not and will not become a race-based decision for you either.”

Sen Clinton then waded into the crowd to deliver coffee to supporters who’d been waiting in the cold nearly an hour longer than her schedulers had originally anticipated — but ran into a group of heated Obama supporters, who’d been outside waving signs and chanting for their candidate. Let’s just say they weren’t interested in a cup of Joe.

“We don’t want your coffee,” one said. “Stay out of Harlem.” As the chants of “be a part of something great, Obama ‘08″ continued, the man commanded Clinton to stop trying to “steal the black vote.”