BRATTLEBORO, Vt. - Barack Obama's state campaign has made its temporary home in a tiny art gallery, tucked into one of the picturesque brick buildings lining Main Street. Surrounded by paintings in brilliant hues, a handful of volunteers in sweaters and jeans dial voters on their cellphones.
"The gallery was built on passion, and the art I show is from passionate artists," said Catherine Dianich Gruver, the gallery's owner and curator. "Why wouldn't I support someone running for president that is so passionate about his ideals?"
About 140 miles to the southeast, the Hillary Clinton campaign in Rhode Island has set up shop in a squat brick building alongside a traffic-clogged intersection in Providence. A room cluttered with yard signs buzzes with activity - phone calls, meetings, people gathering to canvass.
"We had a meeting just now with folks who drive taxis," said state Senator Juan Pichardo. "They're saying, 'We're strong with Hillary here in Providence.' "
The two states, in opposite corners of New England, will hold presidential primaries on Tuesday, and their electorates represent different faces of the Democratic Party where Obama and Clinton have drawn the most strength.
In Vermont, where polls show Obama is 15 or 20 percentage points ahead, voters are better educated and mostly white; they strongly favor grassroots campaigns and have shown a great fondness for political iconoclasts. In Rhode Island, where Clinton is clinging to a lead, the electorate is largely working class, Hispanics are becoming more influential, and an old-school Democratic machine remains largely intact.
Most of the focus in recent days has been on Ohio and Texas, which will award nearly eight times as many delegates combined on Tuesday as Vermont and Rhode Island - and whose votes could determine whether Clinton continues her campaign.
But in the closest primary campaign in a generation, neither candidate can afford to surrender a single delegate, so both are devoting unprecedented attention to New England's smallest states. Over the last week, the race has grown especially heated in Rhode Island, where a recent Brown University poll shows Obama within 8 percentage points of Clinton.
Both candidates have dispatched their spouses and surrogates to campaign here, and last Sunday, Clinton addressed several thousand people at Rhode Island College, where she spoke sarcastically about Obama's themes of hope and bipartisanship, saying she knew better than to think that "the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect."
Yesterday at the same recreation center, addressing a crowd of more than 5,000 - not including about 5,000 more who were turned away for lack of space, Obama responded in kind.
"They say, 'Oh, they just like him because he talks good, they're just infatuated.' Well, let me tell you something, I bet there are a lot of people here who have been through hard times," he said, as the crowd cheered. "Hope is not wide-eyed optimism. . . . Hope is believing and then working and fighting for things."
The boisterous crowd cheered after virtually every line uttered by Obama, who also accused Clinton of changing her positions and not offering "real change." One person fainted - an occurrence that has become routine for Obama, who told the crowd to drink some juice and not worry. "If we can open some of the doors, it might cool things off a little bit," he said calmly.
Neither candidate has visited Vermont in the last year, but the campaigns have hardly abandoned the state.
The Clinton camp has nine staffers in the state and is hosting phone-banking parties; Chelsea Clinton dropped by the University of Vermont in Burlington on Friday; and the campaign even sent a delegation of farmers from New York state across the border to talk with their Vermont neighbors about agricultural policy.
But Vermonters' excitement about Obama - and his inspirational message - seems positively feverish. Hundreds of canvassers are going door-to-door this weekend. When the campaign recently asked Deb Shumlin, a jewelry maker and the wife of state Senate President Peter Shumlin, to organize a small audience in Putney to listen to Anthony Lake, a former national security adviser to President Clinton and now an Obama foreign policy adviser, the aim was to get 25 people. Shumlin was astounded when 325 people showed up.
"People were just so grateful," she said. "They didn't care that Barack wasn't showing up. . . . They just want to hear more."
And the excitement is not merely confined to liberals. Shumlin said her father, an auto mechanic, has placed an Obama sticker next to his NRA sticker on the back of his rusty
Vermonters supporting Obama pointed to a variety of concerns that they hoped he would address: the environment, healthcare, the economic outlook for working people, and America's standing in the world.
Obama's popularity in Vermont also has partly to do with his early opposition to the war in Iraq, which is extremely unpopular here. (Brattleboro not only voted to impeach President Bush last year, but at its town meeting on Tuesday, residents will vote on whether the president and Vice President Dick Cheney should be arrested for war crimes, should they ever set foot in Vermont.)
"As a Vermonter, it feels like we're trying to wake the rest of the country up," said Ezra Distler, a 26-year-old photographer and Obama supporter.
Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, also noted that the state has a rebellious streak - it was the first to abolish slavery and the first to allow civil unions for gay couples.
"The Clintons are the establishment," he said, "so consequently, voting against them is more in tune with our state."
But Vermonters have also been more comfortable with women in leadership positions than voters in other states; Vermont was the first state to elect a woman governor - Madeleine Kunin - to three consecutive terms.
To Clinton supporters like Scot Borofsky, a 50-year-old artist and construction worker from Brattleboro, Vermonters' fascination with Obama is bewildering.
"I've been joking that I'm the last feminist in Brattleboro," said Borofsky, who says Clinton is by far the most experienced and the best-equipped to take on likely Republican nominee John McCain. "The last time women voted for a man because he was good-looking and had charisma, we got Bush. I'm shocked that they have been seduced away from this opportunity."
Kunin - who was also deputy education secretary and ambassador to Switzerland during the Clinton administration - is now co-chairing Clinton's Vermont campaign and still holding out hope that Clinton could win the state.
"We know it's an uphill fight, but we have a chance," she said.
In Rhode Island, Clinton's prospects appear much better. She has backing from a huge portion of the state's political establishment, including US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Providence Mayor David Cicilline, and the state treasurer, secretary of state, and lieutenant governor.
The institutional support reflects the Clintons' long history with Rhode Island, political observers say, and both Clintons have visited the state many times over the years to raise money for local politicians or visit friends. State Democratic Party chairman Bill Lynch said this has given Rhode Islanders, who are used to intimate campaigns, the sense that they know Hillary Clinton.
"Rhode Islanders expect to actually meet or see the candidate in person because they're so used to it," he said.
But Lynch also said that outsiders underestimate the inroads that Obama has made here, noting that thousands of new voters have registered in the past several months. Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University, said Obama had outspent Clinton on television advertising in the state, and his 11 straight victories have generated new interest here.
"Rhode Island should be Clinton country, because we have a lot of women and senior citizens and working class voters, and they are exactly the types of people who have supported her in other states," he said. "The only thing she has to worry about is that in Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin, she started to lose those constituencies. That's really the $64,000 question of this campaign - whether she can hold her base."
If Bay Bender has anything to do with it, she will. Bender, a 90-year-old volunteer from Cranston who helped on both of Bill Clinton's presidential campaigns, spent Friday afternoon making calls for Clinton at the Providence headquarters.
"I think she's smart, she's strong, she's progressive," she said. "Words are very cheap. It's action we need. I've been on this earth a long time, and I know that."
And as four young Clinton canvassers made their way through a neighborhood on the city's north side on Friday, most of the people who answered their doors said they were for Clinton, too.
But as she waited for Obama to arrive at Rhode Island College yesterday, Joan Marasco, 61-year-old therapist from North Providence, said she felt torn over whom to support. She said she was proud of Clinton and wanted to see her, as a woman, succeed, but she said she was also impressed at how Obama had inspired young people.
"We need a superhero," she said.
Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.
