Michael Schaffer reports from one of Barack Obama's Philadelphia rallies:
Obama is due just after 1 p.m. The mood in the long lines to get into
the five blocks in front of the stage is the precise opposite of the
surly scenes outside GOP rallies that have made the rounds on YouTube
over the past week. It's hard to get anyone to say a nasty word about
anything. References to John McCain are conspicuously absent from signs
and buttons and sidewalk conversation. "Look how beautiful this is,"
says Elsa Waldman, 26, a midwife, whose poodle is clad in an Obama
shirt. "There's babies, old people, people in wheelchairs.
Historically, us young people don't get and vote. It's so exciting."
This is what it feels like when your candidate is running downhill: You
get to babble about excitement, and not about conspiracies involving
opposing candidates' religious backgrounds or voter-registration
tactics.
Inside the rally, even the arrival of the press bus sets off a cheer in
the crowd. Sure, most people assumed it was Obama arriving. But one of
the reporters tells me the bus got the finger from a crowd at a McCain
rally in Wisconsin yesterday. Through the weird prism of election-year
October, a beaten-down inner-city corner seems sunnier and happier and
less alienated than the rural Midwest. The residents of 52nd and Locust
are listening--it gets played from the PA system twice during the
gathering--to a patriotic tune by Brooks and Dunn.
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