ON A RAINY FRIDAY AFTERNOON on the same day that it was reported that Barack Obama had raised an inconceivable $196 million dollars for his presidential campaign I stood next to a young woman offering herself as a volunteer at the reception desk at Obama's Philadelphia headquarters on the fourth floor of former bank building a 15th and Sansom Sts. in Center City. She asked for a Barack Obama poster to put in her front yard in Powelton Village. She was told that such a sign would cost her five dollars. And she paid.

"I felt guilty,"she said later, noting that when she worked as a volunteer for Chaka Fattah during his run for mayor of Philadelphia no one ever charged her for campaign posters. She didn't have to add that she also felt stupid and vaguely insulted. Five dollars for a campaign poster? This is change? Earlier that same week a middle aged city employee and District Council 47 union activist used her lunch hour to stop by Obama's newly opened Sansom Street headquarters to ask for an Obama for President sign to put in her South Philly rowhouse window. She was treated like a bag lady trying to get over on Ebay. "You people come in here expecting free material," said a shockingly unpleasant man.

If I hadn't witnesssed the one incident I wouldn't have believed the other. But in a very short time Friday evening I heard mutiple and unforced stories about how creeped out people were by their Barack Obama Philadelphia headquarters experience. "They looked at me like I was al Queda," said one very non-Muslim looking guy with an Irish surname who walked out of headquarters the same time I did. Maybe Obama campaign staffers thought he was a Hillary mole. Whatever, the negative unwelcoming vibe was as noticable as it was unnecessary

So why would Obama campaign people in the newly opened Pennsylvania primary headquarters act like surly twenty-something sales clerks at The Gap? I could venture a guess or two, none of them kind and none of them a valid excuse. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they were hungry. So what? They'll never have another opportunity to make a good first impression. And that's bad politics. The last thing the Obama campaign needs now is to appear uninterested and disconnected from the people in Pennsylvania, a state that doesn't love you back, as well as a commonwealth thickly populated by lifelong residents who never forget a slight. And if a free campaign poster is too much to ask for, what are the odds of getting universal health care?