I know the Obama 2012 campaign has started because I found myself writing the phrase “white working class voters” here yesterday. Oh, for God’s sake, not that again. In any event. However. There will be all of that chatter, and then there will be a campaign that is actually going on in states and cities.
Here’s the first Ohio HQ opening:
Chillicothe on Tuesday was the epicenter of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in Ohio. Campaign staffers and volunteers gathered at 149 W. Water St. to celebrate the opening of the campaign’s first field office in Ohio.”We came to Chillicothe because we know the importance of this area in this state, a swing state. … We’re not ceding any votes,” said Greg Schultz, state director for the Obama campaign.
And here is what politically obsessed rank and file Democrats in Ohio are talking about:
Obama’s grass-roots operation in Ohio already has been kicked into gear for the 2012 campaign, backers said. Over the past eight months, Organizing for America, an Obama campaign arm, held 3,500 events across the state in successful efforts to gather signatures for referendums challenging Senate Bill 5 and House Bill 194, GOP-passed laws to limit collective bargaining and voter access to polls, respectively.“They really got an opportunity to test drive their operation,” said Timothy M. Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party.
I hear “test drive” over and over, because the Issue 2 campaigns and the HB 194 effort were huge, and people are wondering if that will be an advantage in 2012.
Issue Two was labor-led and then gained crazy-good momentum out in the wider world of voters, but the petition drive to put a repeal of the voter suppression law on the ballot was different, to me.
There, OFA succeeded in organizing on an issue that not enough people care about: voting rights. We’ve been harping on voting rights in Ohio since the first suppression law went in (2006) but voter protection has always, honestly, been left to the lawyers. Volunteer lawyers, paid lawyers who bring election-related litigation, interest groups that specialize in voter access, great that we have all these lawyers, but voting should be a core issue for everyone who votes or wants to vote. It can’t be shunted off to the pros. People have to engage on it and think it through, because media coverage of actual nuts and bolts voting process is horribly misleading and confusing, and there’s a whole Right wing pundit sector muddying the water by accusing random people of unlawfully voting.
We don’t need more lawyers on the access side of the fraud v access battle. We have hundreds. We need more voters on the access side of the fraud v access battle. The petition effort on SB 194 took it out to voters, and made us all talk and think about voting process and access, and that’s where it belongs.