What part of the Gadsden flag didn't the Brits get 228 years ago?
The Guardian yesterday ran up the white flag and called a halt to "Operation Clark County", the newspaper's ambitious scheme to recruit thousands of readers to persuade American voters in a swing state to kick out President George W Bush in next month's election.
The cancellation of the project came 24 hours after the first of some 14,000 letters from Guardian readers began arriving in Clark County. The missives led to widespread complaints about foreign interference in a US election.It also prompted a surge of indignant local voters calling the county's Republican party offering to volunteer for Mr Bush.
Oops.
Management's graceless climb down is Ratheresque and amusing.
Albert Scardino, the paper's executive editor for news, simultaneously denied and conceded that an early halt had been called to the project. "It is roaringly, successfully completed. It has been an overwhelming triumph," he said.[...]
The scheme seemed to backfired from the start as the reactions of the first recipients varied from indifference to anger and even alarm.
The surrender was announced in a lengthy "mea culpa" by Ian Katz, the G2 editor at The Guardian, who dreamed up the scheme.
He began with a lengthy denunciation of the American Right for over-reacting to his scheme, and painted his project as the victim of its own success, after many thousands of readers wrote to Clark County voters.
Further down the piece it became clear that Mr Katz was calling it quits. "Somewhere along the line, though, the good-humoured spirit of the enterprise got lost in translation," he wrote.
There had been mounting evidence that urging foreigners to send anti-Bush letters to Clark County - an isolated slice of the rural mid-West - was only hurting Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate.
One senior local politician, speaking off the record to avoid offending his neighbours, said: "They picked the wrong county for many reasons. One is, we're very parochial. When people talk about The Guardian of London, they think you mean London, Ohio, which is in the next-door county. Another is, we have some issues with literacy round here."
Mr Katz acknowledged that an ever-growing number of Democrats, among them Sharon Manitta, the spokesman in Britain for Democrats Abroad, tried warning The Guardian: "This will certainly garner more votes for George Bush."
Mr Katz wrote yesterday that the paper had considered the possibility, but "we didn't believe it". He insisted: "Folks in Clark County itself have best recognised the spirit of the enterprise. Local media coverage has been consistently fair and good humoured."
There’s none so blind as Lefties who will not see.
Posted by feste at October 22, 2004 04:36 PM | TrackBack