I have to give a shout-out to my local Obama Campaign office!

The story starts in a small town in a Red part of Ohio. I live in a city of about 20,000, and in the center is a beautiful downtown area dotted with mom & pop shops, a traffic circle and a fountain in the middle. My wife happens to own one of those mom & pops, and we just renovated and moved into a larger building - right on "the square" (which is really a circle, but...). Our next door neighbor moved in about the same time - the Obama Campaign took over an 8000-sq-ft space that used to be an Amish furniture store. Yesterday a crane was there to take down the "Amish" sign and replace it with "Hope". How cool is that? (This is John Boehner's district, btw).

Anyhoo, this is how the Obama campaign staffers took a big risk and really helped us. As I said, we just finished a renovation, and being in a historic area, we had to get approval from the city to do anything to the exterior. Well a few months back, the city approved the colors for our building - which was pretty run down with broken shutters and chipped white paint. So we made some repairs, put on a coat of Plum with a nice green trim, new awning and real wrought-iron window balcony-thingies.

We finished a couple weeks ago, and instead of getting a congratulations from the city, we got a team of city inspectors visiting us. Apparently, the mayor had a "half-dozen or so complaints" about the color of the building (zero complaints when it was run-down) and they were trying to find a reason to get us to repaint. They asked to see our paint labels. They took them back to the committee, and voted 3-2 that we had to repaint, on a technicality that the trim we used wasn't the same name as the paint color in our proposal (they made a custom blend because the color we picked had a bit of yellow pigment which is not good for exterior).



This made the front page of the paper, and that's when our friends at the Obama campaign stopped by. They circulated an email campaign that was pretty scathing against the City and the way they've been treating us. Here are some excerpts from the email:



... then he goes on to tell the story I just relayed to you in a section titled "Troy Goes Kafka" :rofl: - and a call-to-action:



It'll be interesting to see what happens on Sept. 10th, when we get our say at the council meeting. This is a great example of practicing what's preached - having a campaign put themselves out there like that, get involved, and take action instead of just making promises. I'm very grateful for the support of Obama and the good people in his campaign.

I think we have a good ground game in this county - where Kerry lost big and Boehner reigns supreme. I know I'll be hitting the street every weekend for this group, and doing what I can to help.

Anyway, if any DU-ers made it this far, and want to help swing a red county in Ohio, here's the site of the office, where you can make a contribution:

https://www.miamicountyneighborsforchange.org/

You would think that they'd have bigger fish to fry, or that they'd have done their homework (Victorian/turn-of-the-century architecture was often painted in vivid colors to take advantage of the new pigments being offered). I would suggest that you dig up any pics you might have of the run-down place before you spruced it up.

Lastly, congrats on being a colorful island of Reason in what sounds to be a crimson area!

We actually researched the building and only came up with black and white pics, so we went with an historical pallette from the turn of the century.

Even with this RW BS, it's still a neat town. :)

We have Dems in Troy? In Miami County? People who are willing to stand up and fight for you?

Hallelujah!

And good luck to you, my friend. I think your building is gorgeous.

My first 2 years here, I thought i was the only one - now we're all coming out of the woodwork. I still get the bird because of my bumper stickers on a daily basis.

Thanks for the good wishes!