It was an intimate conversation between Hillary Clinton, her daughter and four young undecided voters - save for the two reporters listening in.

In the aftermath of Thursday's Iowa caucuses - in which young voters flocked to Barack Obama - Clinton has been making a very public attempt to woo the youth vote. At each stop yesterday, her attempts at winning that voting bloc were on display - from the young adults sitting in the reserved seating at Clinton's event in Penacook to her question-and-answer session with young voters in Durham.

Nowhere was the campaign's youth effort more evident than on Clinton's bus early yesterday afternoon. Her campaign invited two reporters to ride on the bus from Penacook to Durham, as Clinton conversed with two college students and two young professionals.

"One of the things that I'm really interested in is hearing what's on your minds about this election, because obviously, every election is about the future," Clinton said. Clinton cast the "roundtable" as part of a day-long youth effort, in line with the theme of last night's debate, which was co-sponsored by Facebook, an online social networking website.

The bus trip provided a sort of public New Hampshire debut for Chelsea Clinton. Although Chelsea Clinton has accompanied her mother to numerous campaign events in New Hampshire, she hadn't made public comments in the state. The personal highlights: Chelsea Clinton went to math camp, honey and yogurt are among her favorite foods, and she was a longtime vegetarian, a fact that left her mother worried about her protein intake.

After Laura Lawler, 24, of Manchester, mentioned that she is a vegan, Chelsea Clinton described returning home "when I was 11 and just declared that I was no longer eating red meat.

"At the time I liked to think that it was purely motivated by reactions to two articles I read in my life science class, one about the detrimental qualities of excessive amounts of red meat on your body and two, about the living conditions of cattle in slaughter houses," Chelsea Clinton said. "However, I think there was also some emergent rebelliousness."

"That's pretty much the way I remember it," Hillary Clinton chimed in.

The conversation was wide-ranging, touching on penicillin-resistant diseases, nutrition, student debt and the war in Iraq. When the conversation turned to student debt, Chelsea Clinton said, "that's a huge issue for so many of my friends who are freshly out of graduate school. . . . My friends are making decisions based on the income level they need to service their debt."

Apart from Lawler, the voters chosen to make the bus ride: Ben Coleman, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of New Hampshire; 18-year-old Monica Matthews, a New Hampshire resident studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and 25-year-old Jeff Penta, a career counselor at Hesser College who is studying for his master's degree at Southern New Hampshire University.

Clinton campaign field staff helped identify the young voters, said Clinton spokeswoman Kathleen Strand.

At one point, the group began discussing ways to keep students challenged. "I went to public school growing up, and then when we moved to the White House I went to private school, largely so that I could be insulated from people like them," Chelsea Clinton said, pointing to the reporters on board.

But in Arkansas, she said, "there were maybe five of us who were recognized in second grade to be gifted in math; we would go after school for two or three hours twice a week, instead of taking math class, to do more cool, fun math things.

"I was stimulated and excited and encouraged," Chelsea Clinton said. "I loved math enough to go to math camp, and why I loved math enough to try it at Stanford, and realized it wasn't what I was destined for."

In Durham, the bus pulled to a stop. But before the young voters disembarked, photographers climbed aboard to snap photos of the group.

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