Ellie Light: Dozens more sightings of Obama's most prolific letter-writing fanhttp://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/01/ellie_light_dozens_more_sighti.htmlOn Thursday evening, The Plain Dealer's Sabrina Eaton reported on "Ellie Light," who'd had virtually identical letters to the editor published in newspapers around the country, with most of them claiming a different hometown in each paper's circulation area.
Ellie Light responded to the report in a comment, saying "There was lots to write about this week, for example Teddy Kennedy' seat falling to a Republican, or the Supreme Court's ruling allowing corporations to donate unlimited funds to causes they support. Both those events portend unimaginable consequences for democracy in this country. And Ms. Eaton, a "Washington" journalist, decides to spend a few minutes pasting snippets of letters into Google and come up with a story about a letter writer."
Since then, others have followed the trail of the Ellie Light letter. The blog Patterico's Pontifications seems to have the most comprehensive list so far. To the dozen or so originall listed, the blog adds several dozen more, including the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate and the Gainesville (Ga.) Times. The letter has even appeared overseas, including in the Bangkok Post. And now there's a Facebook fan page for her.
In most letters, Light claims a nearby hometown. But in letters published in two papers that have a broader audience -- the Washington Times and USA Today -- her address is listed as Long Beach, Calif. That's the same city used in a letter to the Daily Breeze in California.
Commenters have questioned the coincidence of so many papers deciding to publish this one letter out of all those they've received. However, most of the letters have appeared in smaller papers, where competition for published letters is not as high. And Politico.com's Ben Smith, who in an unusual decision had published the Ellie Light letter in ful himself, wrote at the time that her words " seemed to crystallize a point his supporters have been trying to make for a while."
Here's what Ellie Light wrote:
A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would've known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as president wouldn't go away overnight.
During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn't be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires and would not be an easy venture for us. Candidate Obama didn't feed us happy talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. Instead, he talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps towards fixing problems that can't be left for another day.
Right after Obama's election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars, were lying when they said they would share their recovery. We understood that a national consensus on health care would not come easily. Candidate Obama never claimed that his proposed solutions would work flawlessly right out of the box, and we respected him for that.
But today, the president is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It's time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can't just wave a magic wand and fix everything.
