WHEN DEMOCRATIC vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was greeting voters at a Northeast Philadelphia diner recently, he couldn't have expected what he heard when he slid into a corner booth next to Carolyn Bauer.
Bauer told a reporter that she'd told Biden she'd never vote for him or his running mate.
"It'd be disgusting to get a man named Barack Obama as president of the United States," she said. "No way!"
Her view is not unique.
During the April 22 primary, a woman emerging from a Newtown, Bucks County, polling place said to a volunteer in an Obama T-shirt, "So you actually voted for Buckwheat?"
While both comments were atypical of interactions at the diner and polling place, Democratic leaders acknowledge that there is discomfort among some white voters.
Obama's name and his African heritage are obstacles to the party's chances of capturing the White House, party activists are finding.
"I'm hearing a lot of people saying, 'He's too young, he's too inexperienced,' " said Philadelphia AFL-CIO President Pat Eiding. "What they're really saying is, 'He's black.' "
Mayor Nutter said that although Philadelphians have been voting for African-American mayoral candidates for two decades, "no one has ever voted for a black candidate for president in a general election, and what people don't understand . . . they fear, or they're at least nervous about."
While it's unclear how much Obama's race, name and background will factor into the election, party leaders say that they know what to do: focus on economic issues that favor Democrats, get Obama into white communities and make it clear that he has the enthusiastic support of Democrats trusted in white communities.
State Rep. Mike McGeehan said that he gets some racially based resistance to Obama when he canvasses his Northeast Philadelphia ward.
"I'm not saying it's rampant, but we come up against it," McGeehan said. "There's no denying it's a part of Northeast [Philadelphia] politics, and you're seeing it around the state and elsewhere in the country."
McGeehan said that things have changed a lot since he first ran for office in 1990. His opponents made fliers depicting him as best buddies with Wilson Goode Sr., the city's first African-American mayor, whom McGeehan had never met.
Voting in last year's mayoral election showed significant racial-crossover voting in the Northeast and other white wards (See chart, right).
And when Mayor Nutter appeared before a large, virtually all-white crowd at a Hillary Clinton rally at the Mayfair Diner in April, he was cheered as enthusiastically as Gov. Rendell.
Suburban Democratic leaders said that they see little overt prejudice in their interactions with voters.
"It's a factor. You sometimes hear code words," said Montgomery County Democratic chairman Marcel Groen. "But I think it's less than 10 percent of the voters."
How much will Obama's background impact voting this fall? Racial effects on voting are notoriously hard to capture in opinion surveys.
A Washington Post-ABC News poll in June found that about 30 percent of those surveyed acknowledged "at least some feelings of racial prejudice," and 23 percent said that race would be somewhat or very important in their choice for president.
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