GAHANNA - Barack Obama's campaign has integrated local candidates and officeholders into its statewide operation to intensely focus its get-out-the-vote efforts.

Personifying the strategy was Ohio for Change general election director Jeremy Bird's appearance at a canvassing rally Sunday for state House candidate Nancy Garland (D-New Albany). Bird told about 100 people, mostly volunteers, that his campaign is working to win the state House, not just the White House.

Garland said she regularly canvasses with the Obama campaign. Furthermore, Bird told PolitickerOH.com that the Obama campaign regularly contacts local elected officials to hear what their constituents are discussing and how the campaign is performing. Bird said these officials are often asked to vouch for Obama at campaign events.

"We ask them to go out a lot, whether it's going to a house meeting speaking for us as a validator ... we ask some of them to stay at different events to speak for us," he said.

As for the GOTV effort, Bird said the campaign has divided the state into 1,231 neighborhoods and is trying to create GOTV teams for each of those neighborhoods. Bird said each team is staffed by local people instead of out-of-state volunteers, as has been done in the past.

"We are doing everything we can to learn from the mistakes of the past, from 2004 and other years, where a lot of folks from out of state, they knock on hundreds and thousands of doors but they don't have a meaningful conversations, neighbor to neighbor and with people that other folks trust," he said.

This work is being done out of 77 local campaign offices. Bird said the campaign's goal is to have an office within a 20-minute drive for anyone who wants to volunteer. (See where Obama's Ohio offices are in PolitickerOH.com's story last week.)

Bird said the campaign knocked on more than 50,000 doors and made more than 30,000 phone calls on Saturday.

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