Recent polling news has indicated that even as Newt Gringrich has surged in North Carolina, Barack Obama is still in competitive position in the state whether he faces the former Speaker or Mitt Romney. With an eye toward the future, he’s already staffing up an office there for next year’s battle. It may be an odd choice, given the largely conservative nature of the state, however, since he selected Lindsay Siler to run it.

The Obama campaign hired Lindsay Siler, the former director of public policy for Planned Parenthood Health Systems, to head its efforts in North Carolina, one of the pivotal battleground states Obama took from the Republican column in 2008 to pave his way to the White House.

In 2007, Siler worked for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Obama former Democratic rival turned Secretary of State, and now she is excited to help perhaps the most pro-abortion president since Roe v. Wade get another four years to force Americans to fund abortions and the Planned Parenthood abortion business domestically and abroad with taxpayer dollars.

“They were truly building a collective voice, the grass-roots organization we’ve all dreamt about,” she told the Charlotte Observer about what she saw in the Obama campaign in 2008 so, when asked to head up the North Carolina shop this time, she added, “there was no way I was going to pass that up.”

About her time at Planned Parenthood, she told the newspaper, her working for the abortion business was no surprise.

“Either I was born a feminist and was raised an activist,” she says, “or I was born an activist and raised a feminist.”

This would probably be a logical choice in a state like New York or California. (Then again, those aren’t states that the president is particularly worried about carrying.) But in South Carolina, even if the race manages to be a close thing, Republicans will be looking for every advantage they can nab. Highlighting the participation of Siler in local advertising seems like a rather easy and obvious play for the RNC.

South Carolina wouldn’t be an easy pick-up for Obama in the best of times. And given the state’s currently higher than national average unemployment rate of 10.5%, things only get tougher. Also, those poll numbers shouldn’t be alarming Republicans too much at this point. Historically, when the challenger’s party hasn’t settled on a candidate yet, poll numbers tend to skew down in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups with the incumbent. Solid numbers shouldn’t be expected until the GOP field has gelled significantly.