Details about precisely where this event will take place have yet to be released, but it will be in the Philadelphia area.

Philadelphia area “Change That Works For You” Town Hall Meeting
Philadelphia Area

In Philadelphia Friday night, Obama drew about 35,000 people in downtown Philadelphia, easily surpassing his previous high of 30,000 in South Carolina with Oprah Winfrey.

Sen. Barack Obama drew 35,000 people at a downtown rally tonight in Independence Park, local security officials told the campaign, making the crowd at this evening’s event his largest ever. The sea of people sprawled across nearly three city blocks.

The crowd – the estimate of 35,000 came from officials at the Independence Visitors Center – began assembling early, filling Independence Mall and spilling into the surrounding streets. They waited with relative patience, chanting “O-ba-ma” whenever the music stopped, until 8:45, when the rally finally started. They gave him a thunderous greeting and cheered often throughout a speech that was crafted with the setting in mind.

His speech, a new one, painted Clinton as an opportunist.

She’s taken more money from Washington lobbyists than any other candidate in this race, even John McCain, because she says that lobbyists represent ‘real Americans’.  She’s taken different positions at different times on issues as fundamental as trade and even war to suit the politics of the moment,” Obama said. “And in the last few months, she’s launched what her campaign calls a ‘kitchen sink’ strategy of negative attacks, which she defends by telling us that this is what the Republicans would do.

Clinton returned to Philadelphia later that night for her own Pennsylvania barnstorming tour.

Tom Namako’s piece from the Philly City Paper is a great read.  His experience mirrors my own in dealing with the Pittsburgh Clinton campaign office — the missed phone calls, the locked doors, and the stagecraft.  It just perpetuates the dissonance problem that Clinton’s image faces and strikes me as dismissive and condescending.

My first task as a Hillary Clinton volunteer was to get past the campaign’s dead-bolted front door. I began with a hearty knock, the kind you hear when a political canvasser is on your stoop. No answer. I dropped to two knees and peered into the space between the door and the thin rug. No lights. I put my ear to the door, and dialed the general number. Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hi, you’ve reached the Philadelphia office of Pennsylvanians for Hillary, our office is located at five two zero, North Delaware Avenue. … “

Mike Newall’s piece also mirrors my experience with the Obama Pittsburgh campaign office — often young and energetic and always hustling uphill for votes.

I figured the place would be busy, but it’s a Monday morning in early March, six full weeks before the primary, and there must be a hundred people here. The line at the volunteer registration table is 10 deep. … We’ve had such a rush on registration that we can’t keep up with demand.

While neither Democratic candidate looked particularly good last night, both looked better than ABC News debate moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous. Where were the questions about policy and issues?  It may or may not be ABC’s fault that both candidates performed so poorly, but the likely winner of this debate was John McCain.

Obama certainly had the spotlight during the debate and didn’t handle the glare particularly well, as essentially every negative of his campaign was resurrected.  He stayed on message, repeating the same answers to these same questions as he has on the campaign trail.  Clinton did her best to pile on where she could, and she probably barely won the debate.  In doing so, however, she may have set herself back some in her superdelegate campaign by explicitly and emphatically saying “Yes, Yes, Yes!” in regard to Obama’s electability.

The Philadelphia Daily News endorsed Obama this morning.  In their rationale, they dismiss Clinton’s experience argument:

We are frankly troubled by her assumption that her husband’s administration and accomplishments were her own.

Colbert will be in Philadelphia from April 14th through the 17th to cover the Pennsylvania primary. He’s encouraging his viewers to participate in donorschoose.org to donate money to Pennsylvania schools.

Update: Of course, tickets have sold out.  How many minutes did that take I wonder?

Several national media outlets are reporting that Barack Obama will do a bus tour of PA from Friday through Wednesday. He has spent only 3 days since the Mississippi primary in the state so far and will be coming off of a vacation in the Virgin Islands. He’ll start in western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) and end up in southeastern PA (Philadelphia).

During a “Women for Hillary” rally today in Blue Bell, a Philadelphia suburb, Hillary Clinton reminded the largely female crowd at the Montgomery County Community College gym, in a not too subtle reminder of the first female President possibility of her candidacy, that April 22 is Equal Pay Day.

She tied in healthcare to this economic message as well.

For women, healthcare is a constant worry. You never can have it far from your mind, can you? Because you think about it all the time, ‘What happens if–?’ You know, I’m the designated worrier in my family and most women I know assume that role and the piece of mind that is never there because, can you let your son or your daughter play sports if you don’t have health insurance? What if something happens?

Great bread and butter issue to one of her core constituencies.

Obama is a big-time basketball fan and has been playing hoops since high school. He was seen working on his bracket while talking with Anderson Cooper the other day.

From FirstRead:

His top bracket picks include: UNC in the East, Kansas in the Midwest, Pittsburgh in the South, and UCLA in the West.

He was also heard wooing Philadelphia sports broadcasters this morning on WIP 610, and while he seems to have won over the hosts, they didn’t talk sports.

As an aside, if Pitt continues to play like they did in the Big East tourney, which they unexpectedly won, they’ve got a real shot.

Since November, more than 111,000 Pennsylvanians have registered to vote in the Democratic primary on April 22nd. That’s a huge and unprecedented 3% increase in registrations for the party over the past six months, which is just a few thousand voters shy of its all-time high of 4 million voters.

The AP is reporting that while the Obama campaign is presumed to be largely behind this new voter drive, given his recent ads and the campaign’s history of driving up registrations, the Clinton campaign is also hard at work registering new voters for the first time in this primary season.

Chester County outside of Philadelphia has received a “very large, very steady” volume of new voter registrations. In fact, the nine counties with the largest percentage increases in new Democratic registrations are concentrated in the Philadelphia suburbs and central PA. My earlier reporting on new voter registration in urban Pittsburgh also picked up on the surprisingly large number of new voters entering because of this race.