For a generation too young to remember any president but this one, he is the Anti-Bush: young, vibrant, idealistic, intelligent and – there is no getting around it – undeniably hip.
With their teenage years punctuated by 9/11, the Iraq war, and the Democrats’ near-miss in the 2004 elections, just the idea of Barack Obama is irresistible. On the sprawling campus of the University of Missouri, in a key state in next Tuesday’s national primary, the most compelling reason to be for Obama is simple: supporting him has become really cool.
"Having a hip candidate like him makes it difficult to support someone else," admits Mark Buhrmester, 21, who until recently headed the Democratic club on campus. "Young people talk about politics a lot. Barack Obama is in style, so if you don’t support Barack Obama, it’s like you are not in style."
Such a strong, almost cult-like, following could prove a crucial advantage heading into Tuesday’s contest in an election year which has seen more young people voting than ever before.
A young generation of Democratic activists say they have different concerns from their elders. They claim to have grown up in an age when race and gender no longer mattered, and to be unmoved by battles over abortion and gay marriage. Their issues are Iraq, global warming, and healthcare. But their real concerns run even broader, towards a rejection of the coarsening of America’s political culture.
"We’ve grown up in a time where there has been extraordinary bitterness in Washington," said Buhrmester. "We have a president who doesn’t care about the problems that we face and a Congress that is in support of that uncompassionate agenda. When you come of age in the age of George W Bush, it makes it very easy to be cynical, and very easy to be a Democrat."
Obama has been as much a beneficiary as a catalyst of that sentiment. He owes his first win, in the Iowa caucuses, to overwhelming support from young voters – as well as his huge victory in the South Carolina primary a week ago.
That support is now percolating upwards through the generations – drawing parallels with the 1960s – after years in which the apathy of the young has been deplored.
When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama this week, she said he reminded her of her father, John F Kennedy. And her three teenage children were all Obama supporters.
"They were the first people who made me realize that Barack Obama is the president we need," she told a rally in Washington DC.
Not that the Clintons are giving up on the youth vote, or Missouri. Chelsea visited the campus this week and Bill is due in town today. Hillary will hold a rally in St Louis tomorrow, a day after an appearance by Obama.
But Obama’s appeal to young voters has reconfigured the Democratic landscape. Turnout among young voters in the Iowa caucuses rose by 135% over 2004’s figure, much more than in the overall population. Overwhelmingly those young voters came out for Obama. He won the under-25 vote by five to one.
His popularity among young people stayed solid even in states he went on to lose. In New Hampshire, he carried the under-25s by three-to-one over Clinton although, crucially, she won more voters than him in the 25-29 group. In Nevada, Obama out polled Clinton among the under-25s by two to one. In South Carolina, where Obama got more than twice as many votes as Clinton, he won three-to-one in the youth vote.
Other politicians in this election season have resonated with young voters, and on the internet. There was a time when you could not set foot on campus without seeing a chalk scrawl on the pavement supporting a Republican nominee: "Google Ron Paul".
But Obama was able to translate his virtual appeal into votes, and a campaign strategy that uses new social networking tools.
The Obama camp was the first to found a local group on campus in the spring of last year. By the summer break, there were several hundred supporters, said Glenn Rehn, who heads Students for Obama on campus.
In the summer, Rehn, 25, went to Camp Obama in Chicago, learning "how to create a buzz", he says. When term began last August, he put his new skills to use and set up information tables once or twice a week. Although Obama had tens of thousands of supporters on Facebook, Rehn and other organizers resorted to phone lists – and repeated pleading with their fellow students – to get people to events.
He believes this early work was crucial in attracting first-year students as they arrived – "a lot of new kids, freshmen starting in the fall, really didn’t have anything to be involved in."
Clinton’s supporters on campus trace a similar disaffection with the Bush era. Denise Gilmore, 22, the daughter of an African-American army officer and a German mother, who was raised in Germany and Kansas, sees her coming of age as a process of disillusionment.
For her, the breaking point came in spring 2003 when Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, stood before the UN to make the case for war on Iraq. Powell had always been a "trusted source" for her, Gilmore says, but as is now known he was using false information.
Redemption came during a break from college in Amsterdam when she was struck by the goodwill Clinton had overseas. "That made me think, if she already has that trust abroad, she is what we need."
But Gilmore admits she is in a minority on campus. The Facebook group of Clinton supporters on this campus of 21,000 struggles to reach 40 members. She insists she would be equally proud to have Clinton or Obama as president, and that the skills she is learning now will serve her for a lifetime in politics.
Other campus activists offer a similar argument – that they are the first wave of a coming generation of politically engaged youth. The media may be obsessed by the greying of the baby boomers, but a new generation is just coming into its own.
As proof of their growing influence over the electorate, they point to the efforts by all the campaigns to get their attention: the Facebook groups, the YouTube videos, even the occasionally cringe making pronouncements of candidates about what’s on their iPod (Obama claims to listen to Beyoncé and Jay-Z).