Tonight Hillary finally realized that my vote was vital if she wanted to win, so she stopped at the Mayfair Diner a block and a half from my apartment.

About 30 minutes before Clinton arrived, Bobo Beck and I staked out a spot that was just outside the inner circle reserved for Hillary partisans and photogenic types.

The first thing I noticed was that something was missing in the crowd, a pretty big something for Philadelphia: there were no black people. Out of the several hundred bystanders around me, only a few cops and one cameraman were black.

This crowd should be Hillary’s bread and butter; largely white blue collar middle class families from traditionally white ethnic neighborhoods. Her audience certainly seemed to appreciate her arguments with periodic “Hill-a-ry, Hill-a-ry” chants.

She did the usual, proposing lower taxes for the middle class, protection of union (ahem American) jobs, and mortgage default forgiveness. Her best line came in response to Obama’s criticism of her husband’s record in the 1990s. She said, and I attempt to reconstruct this from memory, “I don’t know what part of the 1990s he didn’t appreciate. Was it the peace or the prosperity?”

To put it in terms of Philadelphian politics, if Hillary can win most of the Frank Rizzo crowd, then maybe she can counteract Obama’s stranglehold on the John Street folks.