Text 3963, 106 rader
Skriven 2004-10-22 18:14:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: Guardian
================
When foreign entities want Kerry for president, it is time to vote for 
Bush...

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http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/22/wus22.x
ml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/22/ixnewstop.html


Guardian calls it quits in Clark County fiasco
By David Rennie in Youngstown
(Filed: 22/10/2004)

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.

The paper said it had closed the website where readers collected an 
address to write to and had abandoned plans to take four "winners" to 
visit voters in Clark County. Instead, the group would be taken to the 
"more tranquil" area of Washington.

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.

He then acknowledged that no more addresses were being distributed, 
blaming attacks on The Guardian website by Right-wing hackers.

"If we had not had the technical problem of the assault we would have 
completed the distribution of names in orderly fashion," he said. "We 
were able to give fewer addresses [of voters in Clark County] than we 
hoped. There were 14,000 names and addresses sent out. We would like to 
have made it possible to reach another 42,000 people."

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."

"Good-humoured" headlines in the local newspaper, the Springfield News-
Sun have included "Butt Out Brits, voters say" and "Trashing letter 
campaign" - a reference to the fact that the first woman to receive a 
letter from a Guardian reader, Beverly Coale, threw it away, fearing it 
was from a terrorist.

Karen Henschen, a member of the executive committee of the Clark County 
Democratic party, said scrapping the project was "probably the best 
thing they could do".

The end of the scheme comes as a relief to Linda Rosicka, the director 
of the Clark County board of elections, who has been fielding dozens of 
interview requests from the world's media.

Yet there is one last Guardian letter Mrs Rosicka would still like to 
see - one containing a cheque for $25 (about £13), which the newspaper 
still owes her for its purchase of the county's electoral roll.

"I was nice and made the file available, because their reporter said he 
was right on deadline," she said. "They said the cheque is in the mail. 
As of this morning, it still hasn't arrived, and it's been more than a 
week."

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