Inside The Obama Headquarters in Columbus

So I get an email from one of the excellent activist lists on my.barackobama.com (holla at Blue State Digital, that site is amazing). The email was asking for people to bring any chairs or tables they had available for the onslaught of volunteers to work on.
I blogged on it earlier.

Then I remember I have had this really big folding table in my garage forever. We used to play poker on it when I had league games in my garage. It’s been up for grabs for quite a while and I figured I’d take it down.

The offices are located at 193 East Rich St. The phone number there is 612-968-7864.

I get down and, as noted before, the offices are really close to the ORP offices. In fact, they are right across the street! There was something oddly familiar with the place that I couldn’t place, then when taking a photo outside it dawned on me. This space was the Betty Montgomery HQ during her failed bid to become Ohio’s Attorney General for the second time. What a fitting symbol of change to have her ousted and have Obama campaigning for the Presidency from this space in Columbus.

So I tour the office for a bit and it is deceiving how big it is. From the road it looks like a really small storefront space, but the building is situated such that the space goes way back. There are 7 or 8 small offices in the back along with what looks like a great war room space in the middle. The front area is a great staging and greeting area and there was some information already tabled. I was greeted by John who recently came on board from New York and will be the office manager. He showed me 30 or 40 PCs and monitors brought in from New Hampshire and some signs that appeared to be leftover from Connecticut. There wasn’t much there yet and the offices don’t officially open until Wednesday, but I expect they’ll be hopping by then.

During the brief 5 minutes that I was there two people stopped by. One practically begging for a yard sign (I gave her one of the 3 I had snagged for people up in Delaware) and one wrote a $100 dollar check and handed it to John. Both were obviously fired up and ready to go.

There isn’t much time and both camps know this. The Billary Show is banking on the institutional support. We have to bank on us. Get a walk list. Download a flyer. Print some out. Go walking (yes, even in the snow). I can tell you that there are dozens of people in Delaware that are organizing and planning on spreading the word. You can too. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for: