Canvassing for Clinton and hoping for a big win
Dante Chinni
Posted: 04.22.2008 / 2:45 PM EDT
PHILADELPHIA – If there was any doubt what the goal of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was in Pennsylvania, it could have been answered by walking into her Northeast Philadelphia headquarters at 10:30 this morning.
“Double digits,” yelled one volunteer as she walked through the door of the office. The group cheered. “Double digits,” she said again. “I didn’t get up at 4 in the morning for nothing.”
The small rectangle of a room at 7727 Frankford Avenue was already crowded when two bus loads of volunteers from New York arrived. “Woo-hoo! New York City is here,” one yelled.
New York City has been here all week for Senator Clinton. For some volunteers, like Mary Ellen Courtney of Queens, this was the fourth consecutive day commuting to Philadelphia from the Big Apple. The New Yorkers made up a large chunk of the canvassers.
Ms. Courtney got out her map and list of specific addresses before setting out with three other New Yorkers to turn out the vote. “We’re just hitting the committed voters,” said Courtney, who used a vacation day from her job to come down to work for Clinton. “The only undecideds we want to talk to are the ones who aren’t sure they are going to go to the polls.”
The Clinton operation was in controlled chaos as coordinators asked for people who could drive and how many could fit into each car. Clinton buttons were gone, one volunteer reported. Even stickers were hard to come by – though one worker did find a stash of Clinton lawn signs that had been left in someone’s trunk.
Still, by 11 a.m. most of the canvassers were on the streets.Northeast Philadelphia, with its white, working-class vote, should be Clinton country and all indications showed that it is likely to be. The front lawns of the small, brick row houses weren’t overflowing with signs, but Clinton’s outnumbered Sen. Barack Obama’s by as much as 4 to 1.
Seth Goldstein, who also took a day off from work to come down from New York and work for Clinton, drove the canvas team to its target area. He said he respected Senator Obama’s organization, but didn’t believe that the Illinois senator could win in November. He smiled and said an Obama-Clinton ticket would be to his liking “as long as those names are reversed.
”What was apparent as the Clinton volunteers worked their way through the streets was the organizational strength of the Obama team, something many Patchwork Nation correspondents have said in the past few days.
By the time the Clinton workers traveling with Mr. Goldstein arrived at their blocks, the Obama people had already come and gone. The telltale sign they were there: Obama literature, which showed evidence of a well-organized, well-funded team. It wasn’t just bigger and brighter than Clinton’s; it was also customized with a label telling the people in that household where their polling place was.
Outside the city, in suburban Lansdale, early signs indicated voters weren’t pouring in to vote, but the numbers weren’t bad. Republican committeeman Don Riley said that while he thought turnout would be higher than usual, he was not expecting more than 250 of the 800 registered voters in the ward to show up.Lansdale, in the crucial Monied ’Burb of Montgomery County, is thought to be evenly divided between Clinton and Obama supporters and, thus, may prove to be a bellwether community.
A random sampling of voters suggested that the race could be close.A number of voters – including an 18-year-old high school student voting for the first time – said Bill Clinton’s speech at North Penn High had swayed their decision toward Clinton. But at another polling location two blocks down the street, Ron Zigler said he voted for Obama because Clinton had too much political baggage from her husband’s years in the White House.
In general, enthusiasm prevailed on the streets. People driving on North Broad Street honked their horns to demonstrate support for one or the other of the Democratic contenders.
However, there were some tense moments at the Lansdale United Methodist Church. In the morning, an Indian man strolled up to the church and scrutinized the signs on the front lawn, which at that time did not include an Obama placard. Believing the man to be an Obama supporter, Michele Phillips, a volunteer, approached him with Obama campaign literature.“You think I’m an Obama supporter just because of the color of my skin,” the man retorted, before ducking into the church and storming out soon after.
- Uri Friedman contributed to this report from Landsale, Pa.
