If you've been following the Ellie Light matter, this may be interesting. If you haven't: over the last week many bloggers and political observers have wondered why one pro- Obama letter appeared on so many opinion pages, with the same author - Ellie Light - identified as a local resident. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer was the first paper to note the Light Brigade.) Looked like textbook astroturfing, if a rather small and finely targeted example. Controversies like these make for amusing sport, as everyone sleuths and decodes and theorizes until they have an epiphany: it was Cheney and Nixon on the grassy knoll! Well. The other day I got a letter from Ellie Light. I'm guessing everyone did. She gave her phone number, and said "feel free to call me."
So I did. Phone rings. Phone picks up. I ask if this is the famous Ellie Light.
"It's me, it's me, I'm the one who gave the bad addresses, the full of hubris woman."
Did she say she was from the cities where the letter ran? I said or strongly implied it," Ms. Light said. "They'd say, 'we only print stuff from local residents, you're from Sheboygan?,' and I wouldn't say no."
She expressed regret: "I hate the idea that I'm causing newspapers grief, that this sort-of plays into the idea that papers are a liberal tool."
Others have called as well, but she suspects coming clean won't put the controversy to bed.
Do I think she's real? Sure. A little googling on the phone number and some property records suggests she's an actual human, as opposed to a political operative or a cyborg sent back from the fall of 2010 to change an election. Here's her explanation for her behavior, sent in a previous letter.
I think she means Ben Smith of Politico, not Ben Stein the conservative columnist and Ferris Bueller star. In any case, controversy-wise, "there's no there there," as Gertrude Stein said of a city in California.
