I’m in Philadelphia this weekend, ringing doorbells for Obama, and have a few observations to offer, based on a pretty small sampling of some pretty beat neighborhoods in East Philly. No one has yet mentioned his comments about the bitter voters of small-town Pennsylvania, in part because they may not have heard them (the TVs I saw were tuned to baseball and NASCAR), though I’m not sure these folks would have disagreed.

We’re talking mostly white voters who are worried about the cost of gas, the cost of prescription medicine and how to get through the month. Some of their homes were in various states of disrepair (missing screen doors, cardboard in windows) and though I did not hear any particular bitterness, neither did I witness a lot of hope. Only a handful of the voters I visited were completely in the senator’s camp, though more than a few were curious to know why I liked him and what I thought he was going to do for the country. I met at least four women who were hardcore Hillary supporters, but mostly because she was a woman and they all said they would enthusiastically support Obama in November. Primaries are the time to vote your heart.

I only heard a couple of total misconceptions. One McCain supporter told me he thought Obama was a socialist, while another said that “he always denied having a white mother.” Uh, no, I demurred (the campaign discourages arguing with people, especially if there is nothing to gain, but it’s okay with setting the record straight); he wrote a whole book about being raised black in a white family, he’s been talking about it for years. A couple of Indian immigrants seemed to only know a few words of English, one of which was “Clinton,” which made me worry that our outreach to those communities is not all it could be.

The local ads are plentiful and most of the ones I’ve seen from both candidates are issue specific. (I heard one Obama ad on a local rock station that made him sound like a traveling band, with lots of cheering and nothing more specific than “hope” or “change” mentioned.) I’m sure it will get uglier in the next nine days but from this vantage point, I’m not sure the bitter remarks are going to move the dial much. In part because it was one sentence out of hundreds of thousands, and he has already apologized, saying “I didn’t say it as well as I could have”. In part because Clinton has already asked for slack for “misspeaking” about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. (As CNN’s grumpy old man, Jack Cafferty said to Jeffrey Toobin, who was trying to defend Hillary: “Have you ever been shot at? It’s not actually something you would forget.”) But in part it’s because people are bitter, and have a right to be.

“I don’t think he has anything to apologize for,” said Ali, one of the volunteer coordinators in East Philly who sent me out with a packet of names yesterday. The real mistake, in my mind, was the use of the verb “cling” when discussing people’s faith and love of guns; it smacks of delusion and that is what I think Obama was really apologizing for, the truly inartful language he used. But I think it is far more hypocritical for the multi-millionaire Clintons and the the admiral’s son McCain to talk about these end-of-the-road blue collar people as if they were the seven dwarves, whistling while they march off to the jobs that don’t exist anymore. Obama has always been clear about the need for the more fortunate of us to sacrifice — one of the reasons I’m here, today — but he also recognizes that some folks have nothing left to give, that it’s all been taken away. And that just might make you bitter.