Obama 2012 watchers are all aflutter over yesterday’s news that the president’s approval rating in bellwether swing state Ohio has dipped to just 49 percent, down from 62 percent in May. The obvious culprit, as Nate Silver points out , is the still-ailing economy. But when stats whiz Silver compares the Ohio numbers to states with similarly miserable unemployment numbers, he can’t quite come up with a reason for why my native Ohio is taking this whole thing so much harder than, say, his native Michigan, the ground zero of Rust Belt decay. But maybe this Richard Florida map of neurosis in the United States has something to do with it: While the largest cluster of neurotics unsurprisingly emanates forth from New York, the second-most neurotic region of the country is…Ohio. Our crisis might not be any worse, but we stew, we blame, we stress about it more.
