Brits Meddle With Ohioans

You will always find some Eskimos ready to instruct the Congolese on how to cope with heat waves.

   - Stanislaw J. Lec (1909-1966), Polish writer

Someone at The Guardian newspaper in Great Britain decided to recruit its readers to launch a letter writing campaign in hopes of influencing U.S. voters in Clark County, Ohio. Ohio, as the pollsters remind us, is one of the swing states in this election and Clark County has been identified as a place where Bush and Kerry are neck and neck. The Guardian, being a rather liberal publication and having no use for our current president, would like to see Kerry elected come November.

Well, the Brits' letters began arriving yesterday and many Clark County residents are not all that happy with our "across the pond" neighbors' interest in how Ohioans cast their votes. Terry Brown is one of those people:

Terry Brown had received a letter from a Scottish Guardian reader. The navy veteran and retired lorry builder was "offended" as he read the polite note, from Nicola Smith of West Lothian, with its denunciation of the Iraq war as a "farce," and closing plea to remove from power "the parties responsible for this war."

Mr. Brown looked out at his front garden, decorated with a US flag on a tall pole, a giant carving of an American eagle and a wooden cross marked: "September 11, 2001."

"I feel very strongly that this was an invasion of my privacy," he said. "The right of my wife and myself to decide whom to vote for should not be affected by any other country. That was a freedom we fought for many years ago. It was 1776." 

The Guardian editors were able to buy a list of what they thought were undecided voters from Clark County officials, which is interesting in itself. They then published the list on their website and urged their readers to write those whose names appeared on it in an effort to persuade them to vote for Kerry. Unfortunately, there was a slight problem with the list:

But the newspaper misunderstood Ohio polling law, according to the county's elections supervisor, Linda Rosicka. Being "undeclared" on the roll means someone did not choose to vote in the last two party primaries, in which party candidates are chosen. "It doesn't have anything to do with being undecided," she said.

So instead of the letters going to real "undecideds," most of them went to partisans. Oops! On top of this little glitch, many of The Guardian's letter writers were left-wing celebrities who perhaps were less restrained in their criticism of Bush and the US than were average citizens who decided to correspond with the Americans: 

Ken Loach, the film director, began his letter: "Friends, you have the chance to do the world a favour. Today, your country is reviled across continents as never before. You are seen as the greatest bully on earth."

Antonia Fraser, the historian, suggested: "If you back Kerry, you will be voting against a savage, militaristic foreign policy of pre-emptive killing, which has stained the great name of the US so hideously in recent times."

The Guardian project "has sparked disdain from the Right, and dismay from Kerry campaigners." Hundreds of letters and e-mails are finding their way back to The Guardian and a majority are highly critical of the British intrusion into the affairs of American citizens.

What did they expect, I wonder? Probably not what they got. Can you imagine the reaction of the British, the Australians or the Canadians if we Americans pulled a similar stunt and began writing individual voters about who they should or shouldn't vote for? Arrogance may produce results I suppose, but I believe the results this time will be the opposite of what was intended--at least in Clark County, Ohio.