LEVITTOWN, Penn.--Who's inevitable now?
 
To the naked eye and untrained ear, Barack Obama's pair of appearances today in Pennsylvania could've happened anywhere, at any point on the primary schedule--the walls of the Great Valley and Truman High School gymnasiums were plastered with the same mosaic of handmade signs and rattled by the same roar of millennial and Baby Boomer voices as a hundred other rooms in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada and the rest of the states now receding in the culture's collective rear-view mirror. But Obama himself was different. The suburbs of Malvern and Levittown--which straddle the city of Philadelphia in southeastern Pennsylvania's Delaware River Valley--are only 40 miles apart. Still, in the hour it took to shuttle between them today, the candidate traveled, in effect, from one end of the Keystone State's complicated political geography to the other. If Malvern, with its upscale, Main Line Democrats and potential crossover voters, is home to a constituency that Obama must preserve to stay within striking distance, Levittown represents the folks he needs to convince in order to win--the working-class "ethnic" whites who lean toward Hillary Clinton.
 
And yet instead of using the diverse demographics to draw contrasts with Clinton--a skill the Illinois senator honed in earlier states where he trailed his rival, like Ohio and Texas--Obama largely acted if she didn't exist. Which is unusual when you're in second place--to say the least.
 
The questions summed it up. After each of today's stump speeches, Obama opened the floor to the voters. "We'll go girl, boy, girl, boy," he said. "Ladies first." In Malvern, the first lady was Sue Rhodes. A stout, middle-aged blond, Rhodes told Obama about her daughter, a teacher in a hardscrabble North Carolina school district who "only makes $28,000 a year." "We've had to buy a home for her to live in," said Rhodes. "We've had to pay for children's books and supplies, and we even give her money to buy food for her kids." Meanwhile, three hours later in Levittown, another stout, middle-aged blond--who declined to give her name--stood up and spoke about the struggle to care for her elderly mother. "I'm a lowly paid medical assistant," she said. "And even though I've found people through my church to help me with her bills, I'm limited in my time to go to her home and make her dinner. You gave a good speech, and the wonderful things you said about our young people are important to me, too, but what will you do to help those of us who are taking care of the elderly?"

 

The difference was stark: Malvern's upscale liberal, worrying about how to solve other people's problems, vs. Levittown's "other people"--the ones with the problems that needed solving. In, say, Texas, Obama might have answered the former with a riff on his merit-pay proposal (a position his foe won't touch) and the latter with a line on how his health-care plan will keep costs lower than Clinton's (something he often claims). But instead the ladies got pat Democratic answers--with nary a nod to the former First Lady. What's more, Obama's prepared remarks--a sharpened version of his economic message--followed a similar script. Starting with a litany of dire economic statistics--still the economy, stupid--Obama explained that the numbers "only tell part of the story." "It's the story of empty factories, of mothers who can't sleep at night, of fathers who can't find work," he said. "It's the story of the American dream slipping away, and I'm running for president because that story of diminishment starts in Washington." It's hard to imagine Clinton would disagree.

That said, to infer that Obama isn't playing to win in Pennsylvania would be, well, wrong. Instead, he's playing to seem like he isn't playing to win. The reason? Expectations. Currently, they're sky-high for Clinton, who has a "home-game" advantage--and significantly lower for Obama. (Plus, Obama will preserve his near-insurmountable lead in the pledged delegate count no matter what happens.) So while the senator quietly outspends Clinton more than three-to-one on the airwaves, he refrains from overreaching on the stump. Any overt attack would prompt the sort of bar-raising response previewed by Clinton spokesmen Howard Wolfson today on a conference call with reporters: "[Obama is] doing everything he can to win in Pennsylvania, and if he can't, it'll be a serious defeat." Obama wants to surprise on Primary Night--not underwhelm. So he isn't giving Wolfson any ammo. Instead, he focuses his fire on John McCain--and, by extension, George W. Bush, whom he never fails to portray as the Arizonan's ideological twin. "You have a very clear choice in this election," Obama told Malvern today. "If you believe the economy is on the right path, McCain will be the right candidate for you... He'll deliver more of the Bush-Cheney-McCain policy that says, 'you're on your own.'" In framing "this election" as the general rather than the primary (and his opponent as McCain rather than Clinton), Obama gets to skip the potentially divisive process of dissing a fellow Democrat (especially one he barely disagrees with on the issues). But by drawing sharper contrasts vis a vis the GOP, he can still rile up the partisans in the audience--while subtly hinting that he's already won the nomination.

Call it Inevitability 2.0.

 

UPDATE, April 10:  I didn't have the space to mention this above, but it's important to note that yesterday's economic speeches were newly revised--and, by setting up a contrast between the "Bush-Cheney-McCain" principle of "you're on your own" rather than "we're all in this together," far more focused on the general election than the current primary battle. Here's the Washington Post's Shailagh Murray:

 

 

That bit about Obama's "post-partisan governing philosophy" is crucial. Obama went so far yesterday as to "indirectly pay heed to former president Ronald Reagan and his low-tax, small-government agenda"--something that isn't exactly commonplace in a contested Democratic primary. "The changes to our economy that began in the 1980s were in response to policies that needed to change," he told the crowd in Malvern. "The high taxes and outmoded regulations of the New Deal did need to be reformed for our changing times." 

 

Expect more of the same in the fall.