Obama backers set sights on November

Campaign mounts registration drive

Governor Deval Patrick helped Wendy Perez of the South End fill out a voter registration application near Back Bay Station. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)

Senator Barack Obama's Massachusetts supporters began focusing their efforts on the November election yesterday, fanning out to busy areas in Boston to register voters, even as the candidate's Democratic primary campaign against Senator Hillary Clinton continued.

Governor Deval Patrick rallied about 100 volunteers at Roxbury's Reggie Lewis Center yesterday. The volunteers scooped up voter registration slips and chose MBTA stations, parks, and other spots to find unregistered voters.

Patrick, wearing blue jeans, stood outside the Back Bay T Station and registered potential voters, saying he wouldn't even object if some were Republicans.

"I think it's in the spirit of the campaign that if someone says, 'I want to register, but I'm going to register as a Republican,' you sign them up," he said.

The registration drive in Massachusetts, where Clinton handily won the February primary, was one of 100 similar events across the country yesterday, the campaign said.

Patrick, a staunch Obama ally, said the effort is not a statement by the Obama campaign that the primary is over, asserting that Obama is not "disrespectful enough or foolish enough" to claim victory while Clinton continues to fight for the nomination.

"One of the beauties of this campaign this whole primary season has been the range of people who have gotten involved the first time," Patrick said. "That's not just good for the Obama campaign. That's good for democracy."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, a Clinton supporter, said he didn't think the Obama campaign was getting ahead of itself by preparing for the fall campaign.

"They have a comfortable lead, and I applaud them for going out to get people to vote," said Menino, who is not a superdelegate, but who will attend the Democratic convention as an add-on delegate pledged to Clinton based on her win in the state's primary.

"Whatever happens, we're going to work together to elect a Democrat," Menino said. The state has elected the Democratic presidential nominee in the last five elections.

One volunteer said he was not worried about the hard-fought primary campaign hurting the nominee's chances in the fall against the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

"There's a lot of gloom and doom about the drawn-out primary," said Oliver Bassett, 36, of Jamaica Plain. "But people are getting engaged."

Globe Correspondent Richard Thompson contributed to this report. John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.