Letters to the President

Jake Tapper has an interesting post up about President Obama's 10 letters a day from the public at large which are a part of his daily briefing material.

The letter to President Obama came from a woman in Arizona whose husband lost his job. He was able to find work, but the new gig came with one-third the pay; the family is struggling to make their mortgage payments.

The letter from the Arizona woman illustrated a policy conundrum, recalled senior adviser David Axelrod. President Obama read it, and absorbed the lesson.

"She said they had made all their mortgage payments, but were running out of money," Axelrod said. "And they were told they could not renegotiate unless they were delinquent in their payments."

Before President Obama's housing speech last week, he'd made copies of his letter and "sent it to his financial team and said, 'This is the kind of person our housing plan should help," Axelrod recalled.

The president had other copies made of that letter. He had it distributed to staff on Air Force One.

"He had been struck by how powerful the story was," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "He wanted us as we were creating policy to make sure that we were listening and hearing these examples as well."

[...]

Monday through Friday the head of White House Correspondence delivers ten letters to be read by the President, choosing among letters that are broadly representative of the day's news and issues; ones that are broadly representative of President's intake of current mail, phone calls to the comment line, and faxes from citizens; and messages that are particularly compelling.

Some of these, maybe two or three each day, the President responds to in his own hand.

Gibbs says that before two different economic speeches, the President "pulled letters he has gotten and distributed them to staff, to understand what people were going through."

The vast majority of the calls coming into the White House, and over a third of the faxes have been on the stimulus package and the economy, so up to half of the letters the President sees are on that broad subject. Aides say that many of these correspondents also have other complications: bankruptcy due to health care, lost job, lost opportunities for their children.

A smaller number of the letters address other issues, such as the environment, health care, education, foreign affairs, or nuclear proliferation.

And a handful, usually no more than five a week, are from people who have a simple supportive message or inspirational story to tell.

The head of correspondence also includes letters to the President from smaller children who ask questions or give advice.

FDR historian Robert McElvaine wrote at Huffington Post that Obama has modeled his reading after FDR. Evidently we Americans are a loquacious bunch when it comes to writing letters.

In the week following FDR's inauguration, 450,000 letters poured into the White House. For years the average remained at 5,000 to 8,000 communications each day. Under Roosevelt the White House staff for answering such letters quickly increased from one person, who had been adequate in past administrations, to fifty.

Letters from the public were very important to Roosevelt, who saw the mail as a way to gauge fluctuations in public sentiment. According to his aide Louis Howe, FDR "always maintained that a personal letter from a farmer or a miner or little shopkeeper or clerk who honestly expresses his conviction, is the most perfect index to the state of the public mind." The president therefore had the mail analyzed on a regular basis and sometimes read a random sampling of letters himself "to renew his sense of contact with raw opinion."

It's good to know that he's found another way to increase the porous nature of the White House bubble and that it's making a difference in his policy.