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Certainly by now most everyone's familiar with the Guardian's rather naive attempt at American voter outreach. More certainly the well-informed electorate of Springfield Ohio knows, thanks to Michelle Everheart at the Springfield News-Sun:
Readers of a British newspaper have been invited to write Clark County voters with the aim of persuading the undecided to vote for either George W. Bush or John Kerry.
Either? Hopefully the readers of the News-Sun can see through that - a claim that the Guardian is merely concerned with the participatory aspect of the democratic process itself, and not with the outcome? That one sentence implies more ignorance on the part of the county's voters than the entire Guardian piece.
The News-Sun piece does note in paragraph 15 (after the jump) that
The Guardian, a traditionally liberal newspaper, makes no attempts to hide that it would like Bush out of office. British newspapers, unlike those in the United States, generally are openly partisan and tailor news coverage as well as editorials around their ideological preferences.
However, comma,
For the letter-writing campaign, however, the editors and reporters tried to craft the message as neutrally as possible, Katz said. The web site is careful to state that each letter-writer is free to support whichever candidate he backs, while noting a poll it conducted showed 47 percent of Britons back Kerry and 16 percent support Bush.
For what it's worth, I suppose this example from John Le Carr;é; could influence voters towards Bush, but credit that unintended result to his naiveté, senility, or both:
Maybe there's one good reason - just one - for re-electing George W Bush, and that's to force him to live with the consequences of his appalling actions, and answer for his own lies, rather than wish the job on a Democrat who will then get blamed for his predecessor's follies. Probably no American president in all history has been so universally hated abroad as George W Bush: for his bullying unilateralism, his dismissal of international treaties, his reckless indifference to the aspirations of other nations and cultures, his contempt for institutions of world government, and above all for misusing the cause of anti-terrorism in order to unleash an illegal war - and now anarchy - upon a country that like too many others around the world was suffering under a hideous dictatorship, but had no hand in 9/11, no weapons of mass destruction, and no record of terrorism except as an ally of the US in a dirty war against Iran.<...>
But please don't feel isolated from the Europe you twice saved. Give us back the America we loved, and your friends will be waiting for you.
Of course, Le Carré "made a name for himself" writing novels of spies and double agents, so it's not completely illogical to think this is a well crafted pro-Bush diatribe, better perhaps then some of the CIA's best efforts on their Democratic Underground site.
These days, who knows? ;)
