Oh Ohio!

I’m in Ohio right now so I can vote and also to help out with the Obama campaign in my free time.  I’ve always had mixed feelings about my home state (thumbs up beautiful outdoors - thumbs down lack of diversity of culture, people and opinion) and elections don’t help with that.  As it stands, Ohio often represents the entire country - or as Ohio goes so the country goes.  And on a more specific level, my county, Lake County, determines how the state goes - so in many ways, how Lake County goes so the country goes.

Things are a bit nuts here though.  My house gets anywhere form 5-10 calls a day from various campaigns. We have stacks of mail and you can’t look out your window (car or house) without seeing campaign signs.

While here I’ve attended 2 rallies, one for John McCain (with Joe the Plumber) and one for Obama (that Hillary Clinton spoke at), both had good attendance and energy.  As I drive around town there seem to be equal McCain and Obama signs, with some neighbors appearing to be battling it out in quantity sign wars.  The local newspaper for Lake County endorsed John McCain while the Cleveland paper (also read by Lake County folks) endorsed Barack Obama.    Lake County it seems is still very much up for grabs, which makes me wonder about Ohio and about the country. Obama may be up in the polls, but I’m not super comfortable with the polls this go around - there are a lot of things that might change the face of the election : race, early voting, how staffed various poll places are and of course there are still 1.5 days left before most of the country votes - and who knows what might happen.

I do know though that everyone should vote, so takepart and VOTE!

I’ll be back with specific rally and Ohio updates and we’ll see what happens on Tuesday!

Also, if you haven’t already seen it, you should watch the Obama Ohio video below, it’s actually pretty moving:

* photo from G.Garcia’s flickr stream