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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDear Mr President: Obama on how letters from the American people shaped his time in office
Obama had committed to reading 10 letters a day when he first took office, becoming the first president to put such a deliberate focus on constituent correspondence. Late each afternoon, around five oclock, a selection would be sent up from the post room to the Oval Office. The 10 LADs, as they came to be known for 10 letters a day would circulate among senior staff and the stack would be added to the back of the briefing book the president took with him to the residence each night. He answered some by hand and wrote notes on others for the writing team to answer, and on some he scribbled save.
Starting in 2010, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. From 2011, every word of every email factored into the creation of a daily word cloud, distributed around the White House so policy makers and staff members alike could get a glimpse of the issues and ideas constituents had on their minds.
In 2009, Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Medina, Ohio, wrote in, detailing her staggering health insurance premiums in a letter Obama framed and had hung in a corridor between his private study and the Oval Office: I need your health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!! It stood in for the tens of thousands of similar letters he got on the healthcare issue alone. They saw spikes in volume after major events such as the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina; the Paris terrorist attacks; the government shutdown; Benghazi. You could see these spikes in the word clouds. Jobs might grow for a time, or Syria, or Trayvon, or a cluster such as family-children-fear or work-loans-student or Isis-money-war surrounding a giant help the most common word of all.
...
I think I understood that if somebody writes a letter and they get any kind of response, that theres a sense of ... being heard, he said. And so often, especially back in 2009, 2010, 2011, a lot of people were going through a lot of hardship. And a lot of them felt alone in that hardship. They were losing their homes, or theyre dealing with somebody at the bank and the bank saying: Theres nothing we can do. Youre going to lose your house. Or theyve got a pink slip, and theyve lost their job, and theyre going to interview after interview after interview. Over time, I think its easy for folks to feel a little invisible, as if nobodys paying attention. And so I did, I think, understand that if I could at least let them know that I saw them and I heard them, maybe theyd feel a little bit less lonely in those struggles.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2018/aug/18/barack-obama-reveals-how-letters-from-the-american-people-shaped-his-presidency-interview
Starting in 2010, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. From 2011, every word of every email factored into the creation of a daily word cloud, distributed around the White House so policy makers and staff members alike could get a glimpse of the issues and ideas constituents had on their minds.
In 2009, Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Medina, Ohio, wrote in, detailing her staggering health insurance premiums in a letter Obama framed and had hung in a corridor between his private study and the Oval Office: I need your health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!! It stood in for the tens of thousands of similar letters he got on the healthcare issue alone. They saw spikes in volume after major events such as the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina; the Paris terrorist attacks; the government shutdown; Benghazi. You could see these spikes in the word clouds. Jobs might grow for a time, or Syria, or Trayvon, or a cluster such as family-children-fear or work-loans-student or Isis-money-war surrounding a giant help the most common word of all.
...
I think I understood that if somebody writes a letter and they get any kind of response, that theres a sense of ... being heard, he said. And so often, especially back in 2009, 2010, 2011, a lot of people were going through a lot of hardship. And a lot of them felt alone in that hardship. They were losing their homes, or theyre dealing with somebody at the bank and the bank saying: Theres nothing we can do. Youre going to lose your house. Or theyve got a pink slip, and theyve lost their job, and theyre going to interview after interview after interview. Over time, I think its easy for folks to feel a little invisible, as if nobodys paying attention. And so I did, I think, understand that if I could at least let them know that I saw them and I heard them, maybe theyd feel a little bit less lonely in those struggles.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2018/aug/18/barack-obama-reveals-how-letters-from-the-american-people-shaped-his-presidency-interview
This is an edited extract from To Obama: With Love, Joy, Hate and Despair by Jeanne Marie Laskas, published by Bloomsbury on 18 September.
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Dear Mr President: Obama on how letters from the American people shaped his time in office (Original Post)
muriel_volestrangler
Aug 2018
OP
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)1. I miss this good man with a kind heart and discerning mind.
I miss my President.
sinkingfeeling
(51,464 posts)2. I miss a president with a brain and some manners.
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)3. I have one of his replies...
hanging on the wall just to my left.
It's already a treasured family heirloom.
pazzyanne
(6,556 posts)4. Again with the tears.
I have never missed a non-family member so much. I'm glad he has become a little more visible recently. We need his compassionate sanity more than ever after the last year and a half.