Levittown, PA

The most recent New York Times Magazine included a story by Michael Sokolove, a Pennsylvania native who went back to his Eastern PA hometown to get some perspective on the race between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama for the Democrat nomination for president.

Here's what he found.

Key graph:

I was focused primarily on Levittown’s response to Obama. Here, after all, was a place that needed a big change, a new dream, which for many voters Obama — with his mixed race, international background, inspiring life story and his soaring rhetoric — represents. But Levittown, while largely Democratic, is composed of many white, working-class “Reagan Democrats,” exactly the part of the electorate that has been least receptive to him — even before the controversy over the incendiary remarks by Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

I have a hunch that what Sokolove heard in Levittown is similar to what an investigation would yield in the old industrial towns of Western Pennsylvania, as well. Many Democrats in the Keystone State's small towns aren't really into "agents of change."

(Yours truly has the battle scars and old campaign debt to prove it!) :-)

The photo above is credited to Mark Peterson.