obama penn state

STATE COLLEGE - Sen. Barack Obama drew cheers from a crowd of thousands sprawling across the lawn in front of Penn State's Old Main, as he called on students to perform community service in return for tuition grants.

Mr. Obama came here as part of a statewide bus tour leading up to the state's April 22 primary.

Courting votes from the student-dominated crowd, he told them that he found his call to public service working as a community organizer in Chicago. "It was the best education I ever had - it taught me that change happens from the bottom up, not the top down.'' The Illinois senator spoke to a crowd estimated at more than 20,000 under blue skies laced with thin cirrus clouds.

Describing his proposal for tuition assistance, which is broadly similar to one outlined by his rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama said, "We'll invest in you; you'll invest in America; together we'll march this country forward.''

After months of a bruising campaign, he offered praise for the public service of his White House rivals, Mrs. Clinton and Republican Sen. John S. McCain, but described both as mired in the partisanship of Washington.

Mr. Obama has faced challenging demographic terrain throughout this tour, but the crowd's response and the data from earlier primaries suggested that he was in Obama country yesterday.

Older voters have been consistent allies of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton while younger voters have been a reliable asset for her Illinois rival.

In Pittsburgh, Greensburg and Altoona, Mr. Obama campaigned in communities with higher percentages of older voters than this college town.

According to an analysis of exit poll data by the Pew Research Center, younger voters have not only favored Mr. Obama, but they have formed a larger proportion of the overall electorate than in the past, an increase even more noteworthy in that overall turnout has soared in the Democratic contests. This year, young voters have been a larger slice of a larger pie.

In the Super Tuesday contests, voters under 30 constituted a higher share of the total Democratic electorate across the boards. "In all of the 2008 contests for which exit poll data are available, young people have constituted an average (median) of 14 percent of Democratic primary voters, up from a median of 9 percent in the set of comparable contests in 2004,'' Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew, wrote in an analysis earlier this month.

The largest share of that increase went to Mr. Obama in each of those states with the exceptions of California, Arkansas, and Massachusetts.

After his Penn State rally, Mr. Obama headed to Harrisburg for an evening town meeting. Tomorrow, his bus heads to Lancaster and Allentown