Obama campaign worker Ariel Werner slips a flier under a mat in the Mount Hope neighborhood in Providence.

PROVIDENCE

The wind on the city’s East Side is a chilly bite on this Saturday morning in February, spraying street sand in the faces of Ariel Werner and Ari Savitzky as they walk the Summit and Mount Hope neighborhoods, knocking on doors in a fevered search for voters committed to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Ringing a doorbell on Summit avenue, Savitzky is greeted by an elderly man peering through thick glasses. Before Savitzky can make his pitch, the man looks at his Obama ’08 leaflet, creases his face into a stern frown, says loudly “Obama, take a hike,” and emphatically closes the door.

Undaunted, the pair continue on to their next target, a few doors up on Summit Avenue, where a tall man with a beard opens the door. Here, Savitzky gets a friendly reception, chats with the voter about Obama’s health care stance, drops some literature and heads back to the sidewalk with a smile.

The elderly man will obviously not be encouraged to vote in Rhode Island’s March 4 presidential primary by Obama’s campaign, while the man who favors the Illinois senator will be called and urged to cast a ballot. If he needs a ride to the polls, an Obama volunteer will pick him up.

Werner, 20, a Brown University political science student from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, and Savitzky, 24, a Brown graduate who grew up on the East Side, are part of a new wave of young people embracing presidential campaigns like no generation since the Vietnam War protesters of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This is especially true in Rhode Island as the days dwindle toward the March 4 primary faceoff between Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Public opinion surveys show the race as competitive and passions are overflowing as decision day approaches.

“More and more, I hear people saying they are for Hillary,” says Craig Auster, a Carmel, N.Y., native, and a spokesman for the Brown students campaigning for Clinton. “We see people inspired by Hillary’s message of actual policy changes.”

Jemma Coster, of Barrington, is a Rhode Island College student studying nursing. “I like Obama’s ideas and I don’t have anything against him. I just don’t think he has enough experience. … I worry that John McCain will eat him alive in the general.”

In 1968, college students protesting the Vietnam War flocked to the candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota in the famous “clean for Gene” campaign, wherein they shaved their beards and flowing locks to appear less threatening to ordinary American voters. Other students of that era worked for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, a quest that was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in June 1968.

This generation has its own war to protest — the U.S. military involvement in Iraq. Young Obama supporters, such as Werner, point to Clinton’s vote in the Senate authorizing President Bush’s military posture in Iraq. Fueled by the technologies of the Digital Age, Iraq, concerns about health care, a faltering economy and global climate change, the 2008 election campaign has drawn legions of young voters.

While Obama tries to surf youthful idealism and a demographic wave all the way to the White House, the Clinton forces are pushing back, enlisting young volunteers and voters in her quest to become the first woman president.

Rhode Island has witnessed a surge of young people registering to vote in the last year and especially in the four months before the Feb. 2 deadline for voting in the primary. More than 43,000 voters signed up over the last year, with roughly half of those coming in the four months before the deadline.

Some perspective: The number of new 2008 voters is much higher than either the total votes in 2000 for Al Gore, who won the Rhode Island presidential primary with about 28,000 votes, or the 2004 campaign, when John Kerry won Rhode Island’s primary with roughly 25,000 total votes.

Half the new voters are between the ages of 18 and 29 and both campaigns are hungry for their support. The 2008 presidential campaign cycle has so far been remarkable for soaring participation from the under-30 crowd. Turnout rates for that group tripled in Iowa’s leadoff caucuses, compared with 2000. In New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary, 43 percent of eligible youth made it to the polls, up from 28 percent eight years ago.

Among Republicans, the campaigns in Rhode Island have not been so quick to woo young voters. With John McCain, who has campaigned here and is the presumptive nominee, and challenger Mike Huckabee so far avoiding the state, the GOP campaigns have not been so active among young people.

Which, of course, is not to say that McCain lacks support among the young. “I’m supporting Senator McCain and I’d like to volunteer for him,” said Kevin McDonald, a Brown student who applauded McCain at a rally in Warwick two weeks ago. “We are of course a minority at liberal Brown, but there are more students than you think who like McCain. The problem is nobody is organizing anything at Brown.”

Young voters are more important than ever because of population trends. The so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the biggest in U.S. history, including baby boomers. Forty percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or multiracial.

“This is a group that until this election has largely played out their involvement in civic culture through volunteerism,” said Kevin Mattson, a history professor at Ohio University and an expert in youth voting patterns. “This year they seem to be making a connection between supporting civic society and transforming it in a political direction.”

No matter which candidate they support, these young voters share a technical savvy and the usual yearnings of the young to be involved in causes larger than their own lives.

Boosting voter turnout is not complicated. The most effective way to accomplish this is personal contact with voters via house parties, coffee hours, meet-and-greets at workplaces and union halls, door-to-door canvassing, telephone calls and e-mail.

What is different is the technology. What television was to John F. Kennedy in 1960 the digital age is to Barack Obama. In 1950, about 10 percent of all Americans owned televisions. By 1960, that figure was 90 percent. Kennedy and his staffers had a better grasp of the new technology and in the first televised presidential debates in U.S. history, the Massachusetts Democratic senator bested Republican vice-president Richard M. Nixon to become the nation’s first Roman Catholic president.

After that election, Kennedy pointed to a television and said “without that box” he would have lost.

Obama’s campaign has used the Internet to raise an enormous amount of money — more than $100 million so far. And the digital networking sites — My-Space and Facebook — have drawn millions of young voters to Obama.

Now, the digital gizmos and the Internet have created a community of young political advocates. The new technologies have made it easier to communicate with the young who are fluent members of the digital generation.

The Obama campaign has drawn students who were never involved previously in electioneering, such as Emily Sorg, a Brown sophomore.

“People still talk about politics in the dining hall,” says Sorg. “But with e-mail and FaceBook you can communicate with others who feel the way you do anytime you want.”

To get young people to a rally, house party or schedule a door-to-door canvass, an Internet-connected keyboard can send out thousands of messages to supporters in minutes. Last week, the Obama campaign only had a few days to gin up a crowd for a speech by Michelle Obama, the senator’s wife, in Warwick.

A message sent to the laptops and Blackberrys of supporters drew a throng of 2,200 to the event at the Community College of Rhode Island.

“The new media has been critical,” Michelle Obama said in an interview last week. “Young people have shown us, if you know how to reach us and you give us a reason to come out, then we will come, and we’ll come out in numbers.

“The technology moves so quickly that I feel like somebody’s grandmother when I’m talking to young staff members,” she said. “It is building a structure that incorporates all the voices. You’ve got to have young people on your staff, you’ve got to have minorities and women on your staff. You’ve got to have independents and Republicans, folks who represent a different language so your structure and message represents all those different voices.”

After Clinton’s defeat in the Iowa caucuses, where Obama captured the under-35 vote by a margin of 5 to 1, she began courting the young. Her young supporters say Rhode Island could be part of a comeback fueled by idealistic new voters who also value Clinton’s experience.

The challenge for Obama remains merging a strong youth vote with other aspects of his ground-breaking campaign. Since the 1960s, insurgent Democratic presidential campaigns have said that a large turnout of young voters could swing a White House contest. It has always been the hollowest of strategies, resulting in Republican victories, as any supporter of McCarthy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Edward Kennedy in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Bill Bradley in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004 will attest.

The challenge has been getting young people out to the polls on Election Day in large numbers.

“The hurdle has not always been how to get young people registered, but whether they turn out to vote,” says Maureen Moakley, political science professor at the University of Rhode Island. “We are going to find out on March 4 how this plays out in our state.”

With reports from Journal Staff Writer Mark Arsenault.

smackay@projo.com