Victoria’s Richard Brunt thought a handful of people would read his short letter to a U.S. newspaper asking Americans why they oppose the Obama presidency.
Instead, the letter has gone viral.
“The reaction is right off the Richter scale,” Brunt said Tuesday. “People are phoning and emailing me. I had no idea it would even get published. I had to shut down my Twitter account.”
Brunt, 53, wrote a letter published in the Detroit Free Press on Nov. 7 in reaction to the U.S. mid-term elections, in which Republicans took control of Congress by winning a majority in the Senate in an apparent backlash against U.S. President Barack Obama.
The Detroit paper posted the letter online Monday. By Tuesday, it had attracted about 22,000 Facebook shares, about 500 re-tweets on Twitter and hundreds of comments on the newspaper’s site alone. It also has been reprinted in other online publications.
“I would say 99 per cent of the reaction is positive,” Brunt said.
The letter — which begins “Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections” — lists a number of improvements since Obama took office, including falling unemployment, strong gross-national-product growth, high corporate profits, a strong dollar and declining deficit. It concludes: “So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason. When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?”
The points made in the letter about the U.S. economy were originally written by Victoria's Gene Miller for a magazine, Brunt said.
Since the letter was published, people have been tracking down Brunt, a freelance writer and online marketer.
A Democratic group from Texas asked to use the letter as a paid advertisement.
“It’s not the White House calling me or anything … but if the Democratic party wants to use my letter, I think it’s a great cause. I told them, ‘Go for it.’
“I think [Obama’s] one of the greatest American presidents of all time and his record shows that.”
Brunt said he was inspired to write the letter because of an article in the Detroit paper. “I was a little bit upset with the U.S. midterm elections and I was surfing the Net … and something in the Detroit Free Press caught my eye and annoyed me and so I just replied.”
