To Obama
Page 15
“There have been times I’ve gotten a letter from, say, a senior, and they’ll just go through their budget,” he told me. “You know, literally here’s what I’m spending per month, and here’s what my Social Security check is. You know, ‘It’s really hard to make it.’
“Sometimes people share letters with me about some sort of transformation they’ve gone through. There have been a number of letters where somebody talks about how they were raised in a family that was suspicious of people of a different race, or background. The growth that they or a loved one went through in seeing themselves in other people in a way they wouldn’t have expected.
“And then there are occasions where the letter is particularly, uh, pointed at what an idiot I am—I feel obliged to respond then and there.
“My correspondence office has always been very clear that if all I’m getting is letters from people saying I’m doing a good job,” he told me, “I’m not getting half of the population.
“But, you know, I will tell you that the letters I remember so often are not the ones in the heat of battle that speak directly to an issue that we’re in the middle of a fight on, because oftentimes those are fairly predictable. The letters, I think, that matter the most to me are the ones that…make a connection, that speak to people’s lives and their values and what’s important to them.”
I resisted the impulse to ask him if he had a favorite letter. I felt it might be like saying, “Hey, who’s your favorite American?” And I was more interested to find out which letters, if any, might pop up for him all on their own. Thousands of letters, over an eight-year period, coming to him in the back of his briefing book—would any specific ones come to mind as he looked back on all this?
That day there were three. Three that came up in our casual conversation about the mail and his presidency and the degree to which one influenced the other.
“I remember a father who said, ‘I’m very conservative and generally have a very negative view of immigration, but then my son befriended a young man who, it turned out, was undocumented,’ ” Obama said, describing the first.
I’d read several letters from conservatives who found themselves changing their minds about immigration, like Bill Oliver’s letter about Quique, but I think this one, from Ronn Ohl of Sanford, North Carolina, who wrote to talk about a DREAMer he’d gotten to know, was the one that Obama was referring to that day:
Ronn Ohl
Sanford NC
17 June 2012
TO: President Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500
Mister President,
Thank you for your leadership in signing the executive order to permit children of illegal aliens to be able to live and work in this country without being deported. You took action where Congress was unable to do the same with the Dream Act. You took bold measures in doing so, even though it was most likely for political purposes. This may be the initial step to resolving the illegal immigration problem and hopefully the next Congress is able to build from this initiative.
I am a descendant of an illegal immigrant into this country. My great-great grandfather was an Irish stow away on a cargo ship of walnuts from England in the late 1800s. I have served in the military for 21 years. I now reside in a community that has a predominate populace of Hispanics. One of my son’s friends since middle school is an illegal alien. My son recently graduated from college with a MPA. This friend came to in the United States when he was 4 years old with his parents looking for a better life. That was 21 years ago. He graduated from high school and played varsity soccer. However, he radically found out that he was unable to do other things legally as his other friends. He could not receive a driver’s license, could not apply for college, and he could not find legitimate work.
Again, I strongly agree with your decision. I talked to my son’s friend this past Christmas about this topic and he thought it would be years before anything would happen to keep him in this country and not being afraid of being deported. For his entire life all he knew was living in the United States as an American. Now he tries to find odd jobs and always on the alert. The illegal immigrants find a way to make a living without being caught and deported. However, many unscrupulous employers and landlords take advantage of this thus abusing and stealing from them.
As I stated in the initial paragraph, I thought this was probably a political tactic. This is the only issue that I agree on your part for the past 3 ½ years. I am a Tea Party conservative. I believe in fiscal responsibility with balancing the federal budget. I also believe in limited federal government with certain responsibilities passed to the state governments, such as health care. I do not concur with your notion that the elite rich should pay a little more of their fair share of taxes. That would in line with a rich person paying $4 for a Big Mac sandwich while the poor person is only expected to pay $3.50 for the same. Where is the Liberty and Justice in that?
Respectfully,
Ronn Ohl
* * *
—
Obama sometimes stewed over letters that were critical of him or his administration. This one was particularly confounding. Why was this “Tea Party conservative” so skeptical about the president doing the very thing he was writing to say he thought was commendable?
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Ronn—
Thanks for the letter. Your cynicism about my motives may be a bit misplaced; I know, and similarly care for, a lot of young people like your son’s friend.
I won’t try to persuade you about the rest of my agenda, but who knows—maybe we have more common ground than you might think.
Best wishes,
Barack Obama
* * *
—
I told Obama I was surprised by how much thought he seemed to put into some of these responses. I mean, one guy in North Carolina doesn’t trust the president’s motives. Was that really so surprising? And he’s going to try to change the guy’s mind in a note?
“When you’re president, so often you’re talking in shorthand,” he said. “Almost always you’re being reported in shorthand. You can get into habits. You forget that on the other side of any issue is a complex person, or people, or communities that are trying to sort through a whole bunch of stuff that they’re dealing with.”
So when those sorts of letters landed on his desk, he took special note. “Sometimes I felt as if I was being a little unfair, because I’d sometimes devote more effort and attention to those letters. Because I really wanted them to know that, you know, this isn’t just the comments on the Internet. That that’s not the function of this. The function is: We’re going to engage.”
* * *
—
The second letter Obama mentioned to me that day was one that had stirred up a fuss.
“A letter I received from a woman in Minnesota,” he offered. “I actually used her and her family as an example of what was best about America in a State of the Union speech. And if you read the letter, it was just describing, you know, ‘Here’s what I’m going through.’ And ‘I’m not looking for a handout or a guarantee for success; I just wish there was something that would maybe make this a little bit easier.’ ”
It wasn’t a particularly exciting letter. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t emotional. There were no photos or drawings attached. Even the author of it, Rebekah Erler, told me, when I reached out to her, that she thought it was unremarkable. “I wrote it in like fifteen minutes,” she said. “I just wanted him to know what was going on out here.”
March 1, 2014
President and Mrs. Obama,
I am writing to you as a voter, a politically involved woman, a wife, and a mother. I want to tell you a little bit about our family. My husband worked in Construction trades from the time he fi
nished high school and I was a college educated administrative professional when we met….If only we had known what was about to happen to the housing and construction market. I was pregnant with our first child.
…We decided that in order to survive, we would relocate from my home town of Seattle back to his home town in the midwest and into his parents[’] basement with our 6 month old son.
…My husband was hired to work as a freight conductor in the railroad industry—a great job with great benefits, but a miserable lifestyle. We had our second son, and I went to a local community college to retrain for a new career as an accountant. I was simultaneously home alone with two kids under 2 years old. I took out very reasonable student loans. We did everything right. Last October we bought our first house. My husband was able to leave the railroad and return to the remodeling industry. Now he is home for dinner every night, and gets a full night of sleep. It’s amazing what you take for granted. It’s amazing what you can bounce back from when you have to.
The reason I’m writing to tell you all this is simple. I did what the economy, and you and the country is calling for people to do—go out, retrain, reenter the workforce in a great job with upward mobility.
The cost of our groceries has skyrocketed while we feverishly cut coupons and meal plan….We pay $1900 a month to send our kids to the local preschools while we work. My student loan payments will start in a few months….
The truth is—in America, where two people have done everything they can to succeed and fight back from the brink of financial ruin—through job loss, and retraining, and kids, and credit card debts that are set up to keep you impoverished forever, and the discipline to stop spending any money on yourselves or take a vacation in 5 years—it’s virtually impossible to live a simple middle class life. We drive our 10 and 15 year old cars that are too small for our family because they are paid off. When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he had to pay for the plane tickets for my kids and I to visit because at 35 years old, I can’t afford to fly my family to visit their grandfather.
My husband and I can barely afford the basics. Our big splurge is cable TV so we can follow our beloved Minnesota Wild during the hockey season (and watch Team USA in the Olympics!). We don’t go out with friends or shop for clothes or toys or anything except at Christmas time or birthdays.
We don’t feel like victims of our life—we have a really good life, and we are proud. We have a garden in the back, and we run around outside in parks and every other free and wonderful thing the Minneapolis area has to offer. We are a strong, tight-knit family who has made it through some very, very hard times in our short 7 years.
I teared up when you were elected President. I took my son to the voting booth with me in 2012 so when he grows up he can say he went with me to vote for Barack Obama….
I am just writing to remind you that the silent ones out here, the ones who are just working as hard as we can to make it, the ones who voted for you—are out here.
We need childcare to be reasonably priced, or subsidized. Two thousand dollars a month for preschool is an astronomical price to pay to have your child be safe and taught well while you go to work….We need food to be affordable. Our wages have not increased in the last 10 years but the cost of living has multiplied many times over.
I’m pretty sure this is a silly thing to do—to write a letter to the President. But on some level—I know that staying silent about what you see and what needs changing never makes any difference. So I’m writing you to let you know what it’s like for us out here in the middle of the country. And I hope you will listen.
Thank You, and Best Regards,
Rebekah Erler
Minneapolis, MN
“Everyone was saying the recession is over,” Rebekah told me when I asked her what compelled her to write in 2014. “And I’m like, ‘What? No it’s not.’ And I’m like, ‘Surely Obama gets it.’ I knew he wouldn’t think that we were just, like, irresponsible. I just thought that he had been one of us not that long ago. He had student loans. A regular family. You know, there’s that old thing that people would say Bush didn’t know what a gallon of milk cost. Obama struck me as someone who knew what a gallon of milk cost.”
Like almost every other letter writer I talked to, Rebekah hadn’t expected the president to read her letter, much less respond to it. But she did get a response, about three months after she sent it. It was a phone call from the White House. “They said, ‘The president wants to have lunch with you. He’s coming to Minnesota.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ ”
Within days, on a Thursday in June 2014, Rebekah was sitting at Matt’s Bar in Minneapolis ordering a “Jucy Lucy” (a burger with cheese in the middle), and Obama ordered the same. She was too nervous to eat. He thanked her for her letter. He told her it reminded him of something his mother would have written. He invited her to come with him to a town hall meeting afterward up at Minnehaha Park, and so she rode with him in the motorcade, sat next to him and across from Valerie Jarrett, and they asked her if she’d be able to maybe introduce him the next day, at an economic policy speech he was scheduled to deliver over at Lake Harriet, and so she did that too, brought her family, and when it was over, they all hugged, and Obama said, “Hey, if you’re ever in Washington—” and then he was gone.
“And my husband was like, ‘What the heck just happened?’ ”
People in the media were predictably and perhaps appropriately skeptical. The White House featured photos and videos of the visit on its website; they billed it as “a day in the life” of Rebekah. The midterms were coming up, and Obama’s approval rating was sitting at just 41 percent. So maybe it was a political stunt. Or maybe, as even staffers readily admitted may have been the case, Obama was just yearning for the old days, when campaigning meant you got to hang out with people outside the bubble and eat burgers.
“People said, ‘Oh, he used you,’ ” Rebekah told me. “ ‘You were a prop.’ But I never once felt that way. It just wasn’t like that. Even now people ask me, ‘What was your impression of him?’ And I always tell them he’s exactly who I hoped he was when I voted for him. He made me feel like someone was steering the ship. That if we just hung on, we’ll be okay. It was like, we’ve got somebody at the top who cares. And that matters for something.”
At Christmastime Rebekah heard from the White House again. Would she and her family like to come to the State of the Union address? When she arrived, she was introduced to people, speechwriters, cabinet members, policy makers of all kinds. She met Fiona. Fiona introduced her to the intern who had been sitting in the hard-mail room the day Rebekah’s letter came in. It was among the stack of hundreds he had read that day; it was just one he had sampled, hoping he was doing it right. “I was like, ‘Wow, look what you did,’ ” Rebekah told me. “He was twenty-three or something, and look what he did.” She met then–Secretary of Labor Tom Perez. “And he said, ‘The president gave every member of the cabinet your letter and said, “Remember who we’re working for.” ’ ”
At the State of the Union address, she sat between Michelle Obama and Jill Biden. The speech was built around her letter. Obama told Rebekah’s story, and he quoted the letter, returning to it like a refrain in the middle and once more at the end.
I want our actions to tell every child in every neighborhood, your life matters….
I want them to grow up in a country where a young mom can sit down and write a letter to her president with a story that sums up these past six years: “It’s amazing what you can bounce back from when you have to….We are a strong, tight-knit family who’s made it through some very, very hard times.”
My fellow Americans, we, too, are a strong, tight-knit family. We, too, have made it through some hard times. Fifteen years into this new century, we have picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves off, and begun again the work of remaking America. We have laid a ne
w foundation. A brighter future is ours to write. Let’s begin this new chapter together—and let’s start the work right now.
Thank you. God bless you. God bless this country we love.
* * *
—
There was one more letter Obama brought up that day in the Oval Office when I spoke to him about the mail. It was one that had just crossed his desk, and so it was fresh on his mind. “Somebody just recently wrote me a letter about when they were growing up their mom always used the N word and was derogatory about African Americans,” he said.
From: Mrs. Joelle Graves
Submitted: 9/29/2016 1:25 PM EDT
Address: Medford, Oregon
Dear President Obama,
I needed you to hear this story before your last day in the White House. And today’s date reminded me to tell you. My mother-in-law (Peggy) was an Indiana girl; adored Chicago; grew up in the suburbs; had a job in a dress shop; met her husband to be and moved to California—the promised land—in the late 40’s. Peggy and my father-in-law were life long Republicans. They were surprisingly prejudiced. They used the N word often! At one point I had to actually ask them to refrain from saying such harsh things about African Americans in front of their grandchildren. When my girls were old enough, they asked them that themselves. Fast forward to today’s date seven years ago—the day we buried my mother-in-law at the age of 94. She had outlived everyone in her family. I took family leave from my work the last 30 days of her life to provide 12 hours a day of care to save the $7,000 a month it was costing for round the clock care for her. We were out of money, but didn’t want her to know. As I sat with her each of those 30 days, chatting about her life—one day I asked her what was her proudest accomplishment. She looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and replied, “The day I voted for a black man to be President of the United States!” She and I both knew that was BIG. She went on to say that she would go to her grave knowing that finally she had cast a vote that would matter. That she was part of history. That she was ashamed of using the N word her entire life. That she never thought she’d vote for a black man from Chicago! That is was the first time she had voted Democrat. And that she cried tears of joy during your inauguration. She made me promise to work hard to be sure you were elected a second term. So when that time arrived my youngest daughter and I canvassed for you. And we canvassed Peggy’s neighborhood. When I encountered a nay sayer, I told them this story and just asked them to think about it before casting their vote! She would be so proud of your two terms in office. Somewhere in heaven she is all dressed up, ready to vote democrat! If only she were here today, right? I just wanted you to know.