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22 Apr 2008 07:48 pm

Pennsylvania Reality Check

I stumbled across this piece in today's USA Today and it may tell us more than any half-assed exit poll leaks about what to expect tonight:

When I moved from the South in 1957 to work on a Philadelphia newspaper, I was startled by the racial hostility. I saw the city's first black baseball star, Richie Allen, booed viciously. I saw Frank Rizzo, a nightstick-toting police chief who arrested Black Panthers and photographed them nude , become its iconic mayor. I learned the city has its encrusted bailiwicks: the Irish river wards, Italian South Philly, huge swatches of black North Philly, leafy Chestnut Hill.That's a microcosm of the state — a collection of duchies from the Rust Belt across the middle's red-brick towns to Philly's steel towers, each frozen in its past.

Pennsylvania has barely elected a black or a female politician to state-wide office. But you know what tends to count most: race. There's a reason Pat Buchanan has warmed to Clinton.

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