Obama Opens Campaign Headquarters in Chillicothe, Focuses on Ohio

• If political pull had a street address.

Small as it seems sitting down there below Ohio’s waistline, Chillicothe just might be the political center of the upcoming presidential election, or at least that’s the nut graf of a recent Daily piece on the city. The story suggests the Maybury-doubletake is a barometer for Main Street America’s gut feelings on candidates, hence the Obama campaign’s decision to open up shop in town. When you tally together all the attention the president and all his men have heaped on us, it hammers home how important a win in Ohio is to re-election.

Smart money once picked presidential candidates — not to mention successful product lines — on the feelings of Peoria, Ill. But since Ohio has come to play such a serious role in the last election cycles, and because nowhere is as quintessentially Ohio as Chillicothe, some argue the Ross county seat is the new inheritor of that throne.

Symbolically — and not surprisingly — the Obama re-election team opened its first state office in Chillicothe in a familiar location: the office space that housed local anti-SB5 forces. Obviously, the campaign hopes to channel the backlash against Governor John Kasich’s collective bargaining hit job toward the re-election. That said, who knows if the lingering resentment over the now-dead bill will hang around until next November.

This article appears in Feb 8-14, 2012.