After my second day of canvassing some pretty beat neighborhoods in East Philly for Obama, I had a couple of people tell me that no one from Hillary’s campaign had been by to visit. And these were Hillary supporters, at least the ones who weren’t gone or too old to answer the door. For the most part they seemed to enjoy the fact that some nice young (well, compared to them) man had dropped by and even pronounced their name right. And at least a few of them let me engage them and answer what questions they had about the junior senator from Illinois. No, he was not a Muslim. No, he was not an anti-semite. Yes, his mother was white and his father was from Africa, and no, he did not come from a wealthy family.

One of the organizers at the East Philly Obama headquarters had a theory about why there were no HIllary supporters working those streets next to me. “The Democratic machine in Philadelphia still believes in giving people money to go around neighborhoods and help get out the vote,” he said. “That machine is working for Clinton but since she doesn’t have the money for them to grease the supporters, there’s no one ringing those bells.”

It’s what they used to call “walking around money” in places like Chicago and even here in Brooklyn. (I saw it in action during the last state assembly election when winos were passing out fliers for party favorite Hakeem Jeffries. He won, of course.) “What Obama wants to do is reform the party from the top down,” my man in Philly continued, “which is why he poses such a threat to these people.” Maybe. But it’s that kind of zealotry that alarms some people and makes them think of his campaign as messianic. They were the ones Jon Stewart was making fun of when he told Larry King, “Obama cured my leprosy!”

Though the older, largely Catholic and Jewish voters I met yesterday were not too interested in Obama, only a few were overtly hostile and Hillary supporters said they would support the Democratic candidate in November no matter what. (These were registered Democrats, after all, though I met one old woman who was supporting Nader. “Ah, you’re the one,” I said.) More importantly, perhaps, were the non-whites I encountered: recent immigrants from India and the Middle East; an African caregiver at a halfway house; a Chinese-American woman who sold me water and sunscreen at the local supermarket. They were the ones who signed my forms and took my literature and made it clear that the only reason they wanted to vote was to help elect Barack Obama to the White House. The people whose houses they now lived in were like the voters who turned me away: older and more set in their ways. Some of them had moved on while others were literally dying, shuffling off this mortal coil in a neighborhood that was changing colors.