Imagine this grass-roots effort pumped up and targeted at George W. Bush in the fall, and things start to look a little better for Kerry in Ohio.

There's more. All winter, there were fliers at every Meetup that read, "ACT Ohio Hiring; $8 an hour. Make a Difference." America Coming Together (ACT), the George Soros-funded anti-Bush organization, has been paying canvassers (many of them recently laid-off steelworkers) in Ohio to knock on doors, register voters, identify their preference, and get them out to vote in November. This isn't big news; it's happening in swing states all over the country.

The news is that it's been going on in Ohio for more than a year, which itself is staggering. Such get-out-the-vote efforts in Ohio have at best been sporadic, unscientific and short-lived in the past. The earliest I've ever observed any such effort to get out Democratic votes in a presidential year in Ohio, with paid staff or unpaid volunteers, was August, two months before the election.

The hundreds of large, mostly urban precincts in Ohio where Democrats get more than 90 percent of the vote, but where the turnout is less than 20 percent, have been a particularly hard nut to crack. Increasing their turnout by mere percentage points would lead to a landslide victory for a Democrat, and it is in those precincts that ACT is most heavily focused.

ACT renders quaint the Bush "Amway" model. Haphazardly targeting garages with golf clubs in them while passing on union halls (note to Karl Rove: Democrats do golf; union members do vote Republican), Bush's minions seek out friends in places like Delaware County, the rarest of Ohio birds -- a county with people actually moving into it from out of state, rather than fleeing it like a burning building.

Ohio's many solidly Republican counties are numerous but low in population. Their Bush votes could be quickly swamped if ACT succeeds in getting out the vote in populous, Democratic-rich counties.

And then there's my mom.

My mother is known among my friends as "the zeitgeist of the American electorate." She's a typical ethnic, blue-collar, middle-class west-side Clevelander. She barely engages in politics, and yet her political behavior is almost exactly predictive. She is the Ohio voter.

Mom voted twice for Ronald Reagan. Dismissed Michael Dukakis in 1988 and voted for George H.W. Bush. In 1992, after flirting with Ross Perot, she voted for Bill Clinton. Clinton again in 1996. In 2000, she went back and forth for months and ended up voting for George W. Bush. She never loses.

This year she took the Democratic primary ballot for the first time in her life and voted for John Edwards.

This thing is over.

Analysts in presidential years tend to look in the obvious places for the ups and downs of the election, at the pathetically empty Democratic Party offices in Cleveland, or the oh-so-cute Bush volunteer pyramid directed by Karl Rove like the Wizard of Oz from behind a curtain.

But out in the real world, something much bigger is happening. Like an invisible earthquake thousands of miles away at the bottom of the sea that produces a tsunami, a growing wave of voter discontent is taking shape in Ohio, as the electorate sours on Bush's handling of the war, the economy and perhaps even the man himself. Recent Ohio polling shows the race has gone from a dead heat to a healthy seven- to nine-point margin for Kerry in the state, reflecting the movement of first-time Meetup attendees and people like my mother into the "Anybody but Bush" crowd.

At the same time, Ohio is experiencing a level of organic political activity in 2004 that I've never seen in my entire career in Ohio politics. It's happening earlier, with more intensity, and it involves more new people than ever. It's both planned and spontaneous. It is everywhere.

And every ounce of its energy is directed against George W. Bush.

A perfect storm is brewing in Ohio. The Bush road-rage bird-flippers know it's coming.

But it's worse than they think.

Mr. Rove, feel free to flip us off as you drive your U-Haul through Ohio on your way back to Texas in November.

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