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.

I’ve been too busy to blog this week, which was a slightly calamitous one for the Clinton campaign. First she was forced to fire Mark Penn for supporting (after having people stuff money in his pockets) a Colombian free trade agreement that she opposes, causing some to wonder if she didn’t deserve a refund for the millions she has given the master of microtrends to explain the American people to her. Then she had to tell her tone-deaf husband (who also supports the Colombia deal, for much the same reasons) to shut up about sniper fire in Bosnia. He chose to bring the matter up again in Illinois, using it as an opportunity to bash the media while reminding people that his wife is getting older and maybe forgetting things at the end of the day, which is all the more disconcerting since her campaign would have us believe she is good to go at three am…

So they must have felt like they caught a huge break when a tape of Obama emerged yesterday in which he was caught telling backers (in California’s Marin County of all places) that people in small town Pennsylvania were “bitter” for having been shunted to the side of the American dream sweepstakes. Hillary seized on it immediately and will be talking about his remarks every day from now until the primary election (April 22). “Well, that’s not my experience,” she told a small crowd at Drexel University yesterday, doing that head-nodding thing she does when she is agreeing with herself.”As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive. . . . They’re working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them.”

Hillary embarked on a “listening tour” when she first ran for senator in New York, and folks in the hinterlands (some of the same land-time-forgot rust belt areas Obama was talking about) wondered what she might possibly know about their experience. She might want to put her ears on again. First, it is worth listening to Obama’s remarks in context (posted on Huffington Post). “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” he said in response to a question about the challenges he faces there. “And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

But this game ain’t about context, of course. The sound bites, seized on by Fox News and Lou Dobbs, were those evoking people “clinging” to guns and religion, and hating furrners — to say nothing of who Obama was talking to (Marin County, where rich people still bob for brie in their hot tubs). Next they’ll get a photo of him windsurfing. He needs to remember that everyone is wired, every word will be recorded and taken out of context (including “out” and “of”). I think he’s far more honest about the bitterness some working Americans feel but honest, of course, does not necessarily win the race. Look at our current president.

I hope to be doing some listening of my own as I travel to Philadelphia this weekend to knock on doors for Obama. I’ll let you know what I hear there. Sometimes it’s good to just shut up and listen.

Movies about the Iraq war are dying at the box office, as an article in the New York Times noted this week. The Valley of Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs and now the MTV-produced Stop-Loss have each sunk without a trace as audiences stayed away in droves. Now Lionsgate is trying to break the spell with The Lucky Ones, a stateside road picture modeled on Hal Ashby’s Vietnam-era The Last Detail and despite high marks from critics who’ve seen it, the producers are understandably trepidatious.

The president of the studio is quoted saying “nobody’s going to movies that look like homework”; people are sick of war (as polls indicate); and those who might want to see a film about it are leery of having it all explained to them by Hollywood liberals like Susan Sarandon (the mother of the slain soldier in Elah), Meryl Streep (Lions) and Sarandon’s husband, Tim Robbins, one of the stars of The Lucky Ones. Though it could also be that people just want a happy ending.

The 1973 Last Detail was not a hit. It got good reviews (notably for Jack Nicholson’s memorable performance as Navy Sgt. Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky: “I am the motherfucking shore patrol!”) but ended on a dire note, in keeping with those dire times. Though the script (by Robert Towne) never mentions Vietnam, the war’s shadow falls over its doomed characters, and informs their hatred of the military. It was Ashby’s 1978 Coming Home that connected with audiences. It was a classic wounded-soldier story, a romantic-triangle film and a hell of an advertisement for cunnilingus.

It was also made three years after the war ended and no one needed convincing that Vietnam had been a fiasco, and taken a terrible human toll. With no end in sight, the war in Iraq is one rabbit hole a lot of moviegoers would rather avoid — especially on a date night. (Might I suggest more cunnilingus?) But without the draft, the nation faces a different divide than the one that existed over the Vietnam war. How many people do you know who have served, or have children who have served? The Iraq war is, in part, a class issue, as demonstrated daily by the candidates who oppose it but must dance around the delicate issue of the brave men and women who etc. It’s not their kids who are dying.

Maybe when this mess is finally over there will be some Coming Home equivalent, or even better: something along the lines of William Wyler’s immortal post-WW II film, The Best Years of Our Lives. That film managed to do the impossible: cross class lines, heal broken families and even make Americans take a hard look at soldiers with missing limbs, and contemplate their own loss. Maybe somebody could just try and remake that film. I see Bob Dylan in the Hoagie Carmichael role…

Do you a remember an episode of the Twilight Zone that featured Billy Mumy as a farmboy named Anthony who had special kinetic powers? On a whim he could put an extra head on an animal or change the weather, and when his experiments went awry — as they did when he turned a man into a human jack-in-the-box — he sent them into the cornfield. The adults who lived on the farm with him were scared of him, because he could also read their thoughts, and whenever he did anything gruesome they would force themselves to smile and say, “That’s a real good thing what Anthony did!”

I thought of that episode the other day watching the regulars on CNN interact with Lou Dobbs. The once mild-mannered business reporter has turned into a bloviating machine in recent years as his obsession with illegal immigration has made his show a ratings juggernaut, and the Dobbs brand a household word. He writes books, he has a radio show, and he is fond of answering email from adoring fans. “You are a breath of fresh air!” read a typical Valentine from last evening’s cable broadcast. “Thanks for holding Democrats and Republicans accountable.”

Whatever CNN’s faults (and they are legion), most of its political reporters are sober, objective types and when they appear interacting with Dobbs, as they must, they smile and nod and don’t scream what many of them must be thinking (“Shut up already, you pompous windbag!”) because, like those folks on the farm, they are afraid — afraid of his following. His show averaged about a million viewers in March, about a half a million less than the network’s 2000-year-old-man, Larry King, and significantly less than Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, who enraged about three million people a night that month, mostly with footage of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If they aren’t nice to Lou he might just up and move to Fox.

Not that he would necessarily fit in there. As a self-proclaimed defender of the middle class, Dobbs loves to tweak the US government for its dealings with China, or US corporations for shipping jobs oversees — unpopular positions at the Murdoch owned, business-friendly Fox. But he likes his vendettas almost as much as O’Reilly does and for good old-fashioned Obama hating, he gets marks for persistence. Last night’s panel of regular suspects (former Huckabeee flack Ed Rollins, Clinton-friendly Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin, and Clinton-pledged superdelegate Robert Zimmerman) provided the amen chorus before the backdrop of Dobbs’s question of the evening: “Do you believe there is a media bias against Hillary Clinton in favor of Barack Obama?”

Dobbs is best known, though, for frettin’ about our friends south of the border. His broadcast is a litany of NAFTA-bashing, drug-smuggling stories and decent folks who’ve had enough of wetbacks stealing their jobs. His gravest nightmare is probably captured in this video which features a norteno of the future recruiting accountants and programmers from the sidewalk, where they have lined up, looking for work (“But you must speak Java”). Me, I keep wishing CNN would send this guy to the cornfield. When he got there he’d find out that everyone spoke Spanish. After all, America runs on Mexican.

As readers of this space know, I like my political palaver better than most. I wake up to NPR, and spend part of my afternoon with the pedantic Wolf Blitzer and the Best Political Team on Television; I always stop to watch Mark Shields and David Brooks on Jim Lehrer’s show and sometimes go to bed with Rachel Maddow. (Not literally, of course. Her bio confirms what the suit and haircut she sports on Keith Olbermann’s show led me to believe: that she is, as Russell Crowe said of Jody Foster, “playing for the other team.”)

But even I am weary of the Clinton-Obama battle, and the prospect of this dragging on until June fills me with ennui. This week saw some killer endorsements for our man in black (first Bill Richardson, then PA Senator Bob Casey), as well as calls from other party machers (and Obama backers), Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Christopher Dodd for Hillary to quit her campaign.

As they say here in Brooklyn: It’s going to happen.

First, as much as I wish we could lay down our arms and get to the business of Republican bashing, Hillary Clinton has every right to stick around and spend as much of her donors’ money as she wants. The fact that it is statistically impossible for her beat Obama on delegates, barring a disaster (and polls indicate that the Wright contretemps wasn’t it) that makes superdelegates run away from him. Second, the robotic business is real: she literally can’t stop herself. There is no off switch if you’re a Clinton. You just keep going and going, as she learned up close and personal at the White House, watching her husband’s endless campaign.

“The main thing,” as Bill famously said, “is never quit, never quit, never quit.” I run, therefore I am — it’s emblazoned on the family crest. I was in the minority, at least among the Democrats I know, who thought he would have done us all a huge favor if he had stepped down after he admitted to lying about Monica Lewinsky. Gore would have been president long enough to convince everyone he could do the job (instead of standing, stricken, through much of his campaign, afraid to associate himself with the administration he had just served), Bush never would have been elected and we certainly wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.

Well, nap time’s over. Whoever emerges the victor from this campaign (and even if you don’t agree that black is the new president, he’s almost certainly going to be the new presidential candidate, bitch) should be able to beat McCain. He just released his first national campaign ad that features footage of him in captivity during the Vietnam War (Thomas Edison introduces the use of sound in motion pictures first) and employs the voice of actor Powers Boothe. Boothe, it has been noted, most recently played an evil Dick Cheney-like vice-president who tries to steal the government from a black president in 24. He also played Jim Jones in a made-for-TV movie about Jonestown. Jones taught people what it meant to drink the Kool-Aid, and he, too, was fond of saying things like, “We’re Americans and we’ll never surrender!”