Obama Taps Youth to Help Make White House Run (tries to avoid "Howard Dean" mistake)

[jefferson_dem]

Obama Taps Youth to Help Make White House Run
Sacrificing Beer, Pizza for a Candidate and a Cause
By RICK KLEIN
May 14, 2007 —

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is poised to unleash an army of young supporters across New Hampshire Saturday, in the first major statewide canvassing event of his presidential candidacy  and the first attempt of the 2008 campaign to translate online popularity into on-the-ground political organizing.

<SNIP>

"We need young people as part of our winning vote margin," said Hans Riemer, the Obama campaign's youth vote director and a former political director at Rock the Vote. "Our job is to leverage the entire campaign to effectively target young people, and get them out to vote. This is the campaign recognizing the realities on the ground."

Plenty of previous presidential campaigns have leaned on younger voters, but few such efforts have lived up to the hype.

<SNIP>

When it comes to knocking on doors, Obama campaign workers say they're going to be more careful than the Dean campaign, which took in volunteers from across the country and dispatched them -- with the orange hats -- to obscure corners of Iowa after as little as 30 minutes of training.

"Everybody realizes what a disaster that was, so we have to be a little bit more organized," said Riemer, the youth coordinator. "We'll be attentive to who we're putting out in the field, and try to match people culturally to where they belong. No orange hats. No alien invaders."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3172234&page=1