Avenues that extend to the farthest corners of Manhattan meet in Washington Square Park’s massive plaza. The place is enormous, but for all the concrete, there are also huge stretches of New York City grass — not quite Central Park, but it still feels like you’re standing in unofficial quad of NYU. At the moment, there’s another reason for that. The place is overflowing with thousands of young people — many of them college students — who have packed the park this humid Thursday to hear Illinois Senator Barack Obama speak.       

 The crowd, which has waited hours in the hot afternoon glare, slowly inches through metal detector lines. It includes seven members of the Yale for Obama campus organization, led by its campaign coordinator Ben Lazarus, BK ‘10; the group left class early to hop a 3:30 p.m. Metro-North train earlier in the afternoon. Just when impatience is beginning to build, an electric excitement abruptly begins moving in waves through the crowd. “Where is he? Where is he!” yells a nearby supporter. It’s so jumbled and crowded, nobody can really see where exactly Obama is emerging onstage, but everyone knows that he is. Finally he’s before us. The security guards finally give up and let the remaining people waiting in metal detector lines run straight through. This isn’t a political speech — it’s a rock concert.

Obama fever has swept through college campuses since he announced his candidacy last winter, and his speeches are drawing outrageously large crowds. Yet for all the youth excitement, Obama is slowly lagging farther and farther behind the Democratic presidential frontrunner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to the most recent national polls, Clinton is easily outdistancing Obama. In a CBS News poll from Sun., Sept. 16, she led him by 21 points (43 percent to 22 percent), and in a Gallup poll the same day, by 22 (47 percent to 25 percent). In head-to-head match-ups with Obama or Clinton facing the top Republican candidate, Rudy Guliani, Clinton does far better — beating Guliani by 5 to 10 percent — while Obama is about even, almost uniformly across demographic groups. There is one extreme exception: college students.

In a June survey of over a thousand current university students, Democracy Corps/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research projected that Obama would beat Guliani by a staggering margin of 27 points, whereas Clinton would lose by 8 — a colossal 35 point swing. Polls on the Daily Kos website and Democrats.com — sites much more frequently visited by young voters than the general population — show a clear preference for Obama over Hillary (25 percent to 3 percent in the Daily Kos poll and 18 percent to 9 percent in the Democrats.com poll). Obama fever (and stale Clinton apathy) on liberal college campuses is not just a feeling; it is a reality, and Yale is no different.