SAN JOSE — In California, Hillary Clinton is campaigning like Barack Obama – drawing massive crowds and casting herself as a grassroots candidate.

“Who are we for?” Diane Feinstein, who introduced Clinton, called from a stage crowded with California elected officials under a sprawling white tent in the San Jose convention center.

‘Hillary!” answered the thousands of fervent supporters.

The enormous and roaring crowds Clinton is attracting out here in San Diego and San Jose underline her popularity in California, and the intensity and volume of the crowd actually seems to have taken reporters aback.

Clinton seemed astonished too.

“Hello San Jose,” she said, yelling into the microphone, as she tends to do in front of larger audiences. “I am so excited to be here with all of you.”

She called it a “great, great crowd” before wading into her talking points about the economy, immigration, what she said was the disaster of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. As was the case in San Diego, she reserved her only barbs for Obama — and blunted ones at that — about health care.

“That’s one of the big differences between me and my opponent,” she said speaking about her plan to mandate health insurance coverage to all Americans. And, “You know that I want to cover everyone and I have a plan to do that and my opponent would leave about 15 million people out to begin with,” to which the crowd broke out into a baritone boo.

Clinton also what she called a “B.Y.O.P. party” in which Californians would use their cell phones to “call a million Californian over this weekend.”

“This is a grassroots generated effort,” she said. Later, Clinton said that the purpose of her candidacy was to improve life for the future, for “your generation, and your generation, and your generation.”

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