(I wrote this lengthy, un-organized post as a comment on Zorro’s great diary below; I’m reproducing it here, even longer and possibly less organized, but cleaned up a little.)

What does it say that Obama - out of necessity, some would argue - has put the most work into registering new voters? Some thoughts:

I’d signed up to register people to vote on Easter Sunday. When I walked into the office, the twenty-ish volunteer coordinator immediately said: "How do you feel about doing public housing?" I wanted to say, "Well, I feel like a white, overeducated neophyte with no credibility whatsoever," but instead I said "um, sure." I was paired with a tall, friendly, patient African-American guy who actually owned a car and we drove up to the area directly northeast of the main Temple Campus.

We went around to most of the single-family low-rise projects, and knocked on doors; most folks had already registered either before the election season or more recently at one of the transit-stop or Center City locations, and probably half the people were asking for buttons or signs. The sign-up page on my.barackobama.com had said "Rittenhouse Voter Registration," so I'd shaved and tucked in my collared shirt and put on a nice coat; I'm guessing people mistook me for a Mormon missionary (at best), and I could see their suspicion fading into bemusement when they realized that I was the messenger the Obama campaign had decided to send into their community. We gave away all of our signs in the first fifteen minutes, and kids followed us around yelling "Happy Easter!" and "Barack Obama!" and other exciting things.

After about an hour, we made a hesitant decision to go knock on doors in the high-rise apartments on 11th between Norris and Diamond. Most of the guys hanging around outside the front door waved us off, and we went in to check with the security guard on the front desk. She seemed uneasy, and said "you know, I love Obama, but I'm not sure what you should do." After mulling it over, she decided it couldn't hurt, and told us that a) there was only one working elevator and b) we should forget about taking the stairs.

Fattah, today, described his enforcement plan as this:

"In my plan on gun violence, I proposed forming an elite group of specially trained police officers to pursue illegal guns in our neighborhoods that will be spread out across the city, not just in some neighborhoods."

In terms of racial profiling as we understand it, which is as a formal or informal police prejudice that views a minority race as more likely to commit a crime - isn't this actually WORSE? Targeted enforcement of stop-and-frisk will mostly occur in the neighborhoods with the highest crime rates, which are largely single-race neighborhoods, so suspicious activity will be observed against a race-neutral background. As a citywide policy, by contrast, you're moving the scene of stop-and-frisk enforcement into integrated neighborhoods, where any innate propensity toward racial profiling is much more likely to be triggered.

I think that the internet is probably kind of a scary place for people plugged into the mayoral race right now - I can't imagine what it would be like to make a decision based on the conversations that are happening here and elsewhere. You have the weirdly unsupported triumphalist screeds of Brady fans, and the continued mockery and boasting of the Doc/Knox 98 guys - whose genre might be described as "Fuck you, preppies." (Fair enough.) You have a mind-blowing array of racial code words (and sometimes not-so-code words) passing back and forth between Nutter and Fattah supporters. Ugh. Just, ugh.