Obama faithful gather for rally at ESU
EAST STROUDSBURG — A crowd of about three-dozen mostly young voters turned out at the East Stroudsburg University quad on Tuesday afternoon for a registration drive and rally for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign.
If the number attending what was described as a "Barack Obama Jump-Off Rally" seemed meager, it suited the rally's planners just fine.
"We considered the rally to be about as good a success as it could have been — and as we wanted it to be," said Tyler Altemose, 21, a senior at ESU and president of its pre-law society, which has endorsed the Illinois senator and invited him to the campus. The event was the first of two or three more rallies planned for ESU.
"With each rally, we want to bring more in and take it up a notch each time."
The grass-roots approach rests, in part, on building upon a core of strong support. "The people who came were very involved," Altemose said of Tuesday's event, which took place exactly two weeks before the state's primary. "That's another reason why we consider what happened today a pretty great success."
Young voters have formed a pillar of support for Obama's campaign.
A Quinnipiac University poll out on Tuesday showed Obama's support among likely Democratic voters in Pennsylvania age 18-44 had widened over his Democratic rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.
Fifty-five percent of those surveyed in this age group said they now supported Obama over Clinton. That number represented a 14-point increase from Feb. 14.
The poll found that Obama had also sliced into Clinton's overall lead in the state, putting it at 6 points. On Feb. 14, Clinton had enjoyed a 16-point lead, and it stood at 9 points last week.
"With two weeks to go, Sen. Barack Obama is knocking on the door of a major political upset in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary," Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement.
Pollsters have noted Obama's strong support among both black and young voters.
"I cannot recall another candidate in the past couple of decades that had such consistent support from young people," Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center, told the Associated Press.
On Tuesday, Obama's supporters appealed to the idealism of young voters. Audrey Hocker, executive director of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Political Action League who is on the ballot as an Obama delegate, likened the civil rights movement she experienced 40 years ago to the efforts now afoot for Obama.
"I heard a clarion call for change similar to what I'm hearing right now," she said. "Bring change on every level to this nation — ring a bell, tell a friend, call a relative."
Young voters at the rally who supported Obama said they did so because of their perceptions of him and his candidacy, as much as for his positions.
"I think our country is in need of change," said Mark Blanco, 23, a senior majoring in sociology and criminal justice. He said he was most concerned about the economy and the affordability of college, and that Obama's candidacy was moving him to vote in a national election for the first time.
"This is the first election that's really motivating people to vote," added Lauren Brooks, 18, a freshman majoring in speech pathology who supports Obama. She said she and her friends had been more politically engaged as a result of the unfolding race between two historically unlikely candidates: a woman and an African-American.
"People are drawn by that — it's history."
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