[img_assist|nid=350|title=John Carney|desc=speaking to volunteers|link=none|align=right|width=173|height=190]Health care attorney John Carney (D-Clintonville) launched his campaign headquarters Sunday in Clintonville with a canvassing push from 52 volunteers for his campaign who knocked on nearly 600 doors throughout the neighborhood.

Carney is running against Dublin City Councilman Michael Keenan (R-Dublin) to replace term-limited state Rep. Jim Hughes (R-Clintonville) in Ohio's 22nd House district. This is Carney's second effort at the seat. He was defeated by Hughes by six points in 2006. The district includes the Clintonville neighborhoods of Columbus and stretches northwest to Dublin.

Carney told his volunteers that times have gotten tougher and during the months he's been out knocking on doors, people have appreciated that somebody is actually coming to their doors to talk about the issues.

"Whether it be health care or education or jobs in the state of Ohio, I think people have had enough of negative campaigning," he said. "Part of it is getting back to grassroots politics, which is, thankfully, why all of you are here."

Carney said he was excited to have the new headquarters in his neighborhood of Clintonville and with the largest polling place in the district across High Street from the headquarters. Carney was referring to the Whetstone Recreation Center, which is the voting site for four precincts representing 3,426 voters as of the 2008 primary.

Carney said that for too long people have held elected office that haven't necessarily had a sufficient background in the areas of concern to voters, such as health care and education reform.

"Those are the things I've been focusing my time on," he said. Carney has worked as a health care attorney and created a free Healthy Living Program aimed at lowering health care costs. Carney also founded the Computer Outreach Program, which provides free computer education to members of the Columbus community and has over 3,000 graduates.

"There's no one in our state legislature who has that sort of knowledge," Carney said of his background in health care. "People have been very responsive to that - enough with the people who are running on a resume of being a politician. It's time to vote in candidates who are running on a resume of actually getting stuff done."

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Carney said the important thing in health care is to work on prevention and encouraging healthy living.

"First and foremost, making sure young people are eating healthy diets," he said. "You look at a lot of what we're feeding our kids in schools - you've got hamburgers and French fries even though we know we should be giving them square meals that are balanced that have a long-term impact on their health. Physical education on a daily basis, much more regular, we've actually been weaning down physical education so that we can no longer research that."

Carney said regular preventative screenings are also important.

"The way you take care of children is really the way you should take care of adults moving forward," he said. "You've got your visits you schedule regularly for your children, and should do the same thing for adults where they're having annual physicals and seeing the doctor when they're healthy, not just when they're sick."

Carney said that focusing on keeping people healthy and what they can do to stay healthy is how to cut out a lot of costs over the long haul in health care.

Carney campaign manager Mark Lundine said the opening of the headquarters was to have a large grassroots kick-off to give volunteers a date to start canvassing, although Carney and other members have the campaign have already been canvassing for months and months.

Lundine said he also expects to have some kind of event in Dublin this summer.

Carney campaign coordinator Brendan Kelley said the campaign was excited to have so many volunteers going door to door to talk about John.

"In addition to our door to door work, we have a strong letter writing campaign," he said, referring to several volunteers working on letter-writing at the headquarters.

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