Britain's Midwest lens on the presidential race

By Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times

Nov. 4, 2012 12 AM PT

DUNKIRK, Ohio — Between frying a few cartons of eggs and slabs of bacon and planning the next day’s goulash, Jill Jump doesn’t have much time to think politics.

“I’ve never watched a debate before,” said Jump, who recently opened a small restaurant, Oh My Grill, in this town of about 900 people. “But I watched all of them, even though they were a little boring.”

She’s paying attention because a British newspaper, the Telegraph, has set up shop in Dunkirk, chronicling the locals’ opinions and their lives in video, photo and print in the 50 days leading up to the presidential election.

Videos of the town pop up on the Web every week, and even the paper’s stories about the debates or foreign policy speeches include input from Dunkirk residents.

Readers in London now know as much about Jump, Mayor Teresa Cramer, pastor Gregg King, barber Kevin Ridgeway and high school football coach Peter Barlow, among others, as they might some characters on “Downton Abbey” — if the popular British soap took place in a small village in Ohio where life revolves around farming and God rather than primogeniture and entail.

All eyes are on Ohio this election season, but Dunkirk, which lies about 90 miles northwest of Columbus, is truly under the microscope. Here, townspeople can expect daily questions from people with accents about which candidate will be better for the economy and what they think of Mitt Romney’s hair.

It’s a novelty for a town where the most exciting things to happen lately were a new sewer system being installed and a ceramics store burning down. Presidential campaigns have never caused much of a stir here, unless you count the time George H.W. Bush passed through, waving from a caboose. So extraordinary is the Telegraph’s extended visit that it made front-page news in the local newspaper one town over.

Many in Dunkirk have gotten swept up in the excitement, recording their thoughts in loopy cursive and slanted scratches in a notebook left by the Telegraph in Oh My Grill, the only restaurant in town. A sign near the journal tells residents: “We will be publishing your ideas in the paper and on our website where they will be read by millions of people around the world.”

Sample comments include: “Obama is a worthless pile of do-do. The sooner he leaves Washington, D.C., the better off our nation will be. By the way, he can take his sleeveless-dress-wearing wife with him.” And from the other side of the aisle: “As a small business owner and parent of young adults, I pray Obama is reelected. P.S., as a village fiscal officer, things are looking up locally.”

“It’s just so surprising to see that the London Telegraph would be interested in little old Dunkirk,” said Cramer, who joked that she needed a translator during her first interview with a British journalist. “This is a whole different lifestyle.”

Reporter Raf Sanchez learned how different life is in rural Ohio after he spent countless hours talking to people in Dunkirk’s one-chair barber shop and its smoky bar, accompanying locals to a Paul D. Ryan political rally and eating plenty of chicken and spaghetti at Oh My Grill, which is open only for breakfast and lunch.

One person even asked him to autograph a copy of the Telegraph. “It was like Beatlemania,” said Sanchez, who has spent the most time in Dunkirk of all of the reporters.

He attended the high school football team’s homecoming rally, where players burned an effigy of the opposing team’s mascot, and watched the homecoming king and queen ride down Main Street in the back of a convertible.

“It was, for me, fascinating and bizarre — I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “I had never seen an entire town turn out to see a bunch of teenagers playing football.”

Sanchez, who has a slight accent, was born in the United States but moved to London when he was 12. Another reporter is from Texas. But the other three reporters on the story hail from Ireland, Scotland and England — a big deal in a town where everyone can name the one woman whose daughter lives overseas.

Reporters have taken turns visiting Dunkirk, staying in a motel one town over (Dunkirk has no accommodations). When they aren’t there, someone calls the barber or the mayor or one of the other “main cast of characters,” as U.S. editor Peter Foster dubs them, to check in.

Foster said he became accustomed to the fact that residents don’t use Twitter, barely reply to emails and don’t reliably answer or check the messages on their cellphones.

“I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be drummed out of town or welcomed with opened arms,” he said. “But I kind of really fell in love with the scrappy little town Dunkirk.”

Foster was in Ohio in March when he saw a sign for Dunkirk, a name that holds a special resonance in Britain because of the World War II battle of the same name that featured a heroic rescue of Allied troops from Dunkirk, France. He pulled off the highway, ended up in a pub, and decided he wanted to come back again and again.

The fact that his newspaper was willing to foot the bill — even in a time of shrinking budgets — shows just how much the world is interested in this election. It might not be surprising that just 30 miles to the west, in Lima, Japanese broadcasting company NHK is focusing its coverage on college students and the election.

“We took it as our Ohioan ‘everytown,’ and since Ohio is crunch super swing state in the election, the powers that be thought it was worth it,” Foster said.

What was perhaps most surprising to Foster, who obsessively watches TV and the Web for new campaign developments, was how people in Dunkirk didn’t think about the candidates very much, didn’t care about Romney’s 47% comment, didn’t watch political ads.

“The election in Dunkirk moves at a completely different pace from the election we’re totally glued to on Twitter,” he said.

For some who are interested in national politics, the British presence provides an opportunity to be heard. That’s the case for high school football coach Peter Barlow, who says he’s finally able to get someone to listen to him praise President Obama. This is, after all, a conservative farm town.

“You have to take your stance and fight for it, and that’s pretty much what I’m trying to do, talking about how I support the president,” said Barlow, who led the high school to a state championship in 2004. As a result of the Telegraph coverage, he was contacted for the first time by a local Democratic organization, asking him to participate.

If you ask pastor Gregg King and his wife, Samantha, the Telegraph’s visit is part of God’s plan.

“It’s bigger than us,” Samantha King said. “We’re giving a grounding to people because we haven’t gotten that distracted from everyday life.”

After reading about the football team not having enough players, the plastics factory losing good-paying jobs, and Dunkirk’s drug problems and population declines, Telegraph readers said they saw something of Britain in the challenges confronting small towns, Foster said.

“The sense that it was sad and scary the predicament that Middle America finds itself in, matched by the sense that Britain also faces all these challenges thrown up by globalization: falling incomes, lack of middle-of-the-road jobs, concentrating wealth,” Foster said.

Said one online commenter, richard_de_lacy, in September: “Not a bad report from Mr. Foster here, I must admit. Nice to see someone covering the real world outside the media bubble.”

The six videos, interactive map, historical timeline, and countless photos and stories about Dunkirk include reports on a hog roast, a voter who thinks Obama is a Muslim born outside the United States, a county fair with Tilt-a-Whirls and a truck and tractor pull, football players practicing near a cornfield, and voters who say the only politician they admire is Richard Nixon.

A few weeks after the Telegraph started its coverage in Dunkirk, the BBC showed up and ran a segment on the town and how it may vote. Locals sitting around Oh My Grill joke that perhaps someone wealthy such as Bill Gates or Donald Trump will stumble across the town next and leave some money behind.

“The Telegraph, the BBC, who’s next?” said Mayor Cramer. “The New York Times? ABC?”

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