You’d be forgiven for being confused by the title of this post. For weeks now, someone writing under the name “Ellie Light” has been publishing defenses of Barack Obama in newspapers across the country. Each defense is nearly identical, but her listed location always happens to be in the newspaper’s circulation area.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:
“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,” said a letter from alleged Philadelphian Ellie Light, that was published in the Jan. 19 edition of The Philadelphia Daily News.
A letter from Light in the Jan. 20 edition of the San Francisco Examiner concluded with an identical sentence, but with an address for Light all the way across the country in Daly City, California.
The examples go on and on. “Ellie Light” has published nearly-identical defenses with altered locations in newspapers across the country. From Ohio to New Mexico, South Carolina to Virginia, West Virginia to Maine, Michigan to Iowa, and Pennsylvania to California. (By the way, most of those are considered “swing states” in an election.)
Light won’t answer questions from reporters regarding her varied locations. In fact, all most reporters have is an email address. Ben Smith reports:
It was one of several such e-mails I’d gotten from a Yahoo account under that name, and the author didn’t respond to a request for more information. That which didn’t really bother me — the author wasn’t making any factual claims, or personal ones, just an argument.
As one of his readers point out, “Ellie” is a derivative of Greek for “light”. Suddenly the name sounds a bit less realistic, as if its authenticity wasn’t already questioned by her wide variation of cities — many in swing states — across the country.
So who is Ellie Light? Is someone paying her for these defenses? Such an arrangement probably has precedent. And is it a coincidence that many, if not most, of her defenses ended up in electoral swing states?