To Obama

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  However, with the hostile attitude some people carry towards Muslims, I believe that it is important that we remain together as a nation. I believe that the tradition of hosting an Iftar Dinner at the White House during the month of Ramadan is one tradition that shows the diversity our country holds. We, as Americans, are accepted for what we practice and how we look. On behalf of the Muslims living in the land of the free and home of the brave, I want to thank you for standing firmly with us in rejection of those who are hoping to limit our rights. Additionally, as your term comes to an end, I want to thank you for all the hard work you have done for all Americans and the rest of the world these past eight years as the President of the United States.

  All the best,

  Noor Abdelfattah

  From: Ms. Madison Sky Drago

  Submitted: 2/15/2016 7:43 PM EST

  Address: Holbrook, New York

  I am 13. I am American and I would like to peirce my nose to express myself. My parents disagree with my situation but I feel as I am my own person, I am American and i want to peirce my face. It is my face to show and it represents me and I feel as nobody should have a say against it. What happened to the land of the free? You only live once…who knows when my time will come and I want to make the best of my years.

  Submitted via whitehouse.gov

  Ms. Samantha Lauren Frashier

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  7/20/2016 10:03 AM

  Dear Mr. President,

  I know this is a long shot, but I being optimistic and I’m trying. I want to make a change. I may be one person but I’ve already changed the lives of others. I am 29 years old, the mother of 7 month old twin boys and have almost 3 years clean from using heroin. I have been contacting my local officials and sharing my story of hope with others. I am helping start a non profit recovery home here in Warren County, Ohio by Cincinnati. We have nothing. I spent hours on the phone trying to find a place for a friend. I am watching my friends around me die. And I can’t help them because the only option is to send them to Florida, New York, California ect. I remember hearing you speak about putting in some funding into substance abuse and I am curious what it went to? I am also interested in figuring out the best way to help addicts. Prison is not helping and the laws are crazy with this involuntary manslaughter charges. Prison is not the answer. I urge you to please contact me, I have sooo many things I would love to speak with you about. I know it may not be possible, but a girl can dream! Thank you!!

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  WASHINGTON

  August 4, 2016

  Ms. Samantha Lauren Frashier

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  Dear Samantha,

  Thank you for writing and for sharing your story. Every day, I am inspired by resilient Americans like you who summon extraordinary courage and strength to live healthy and productive lives in recovery.

  Too many Americans are affected by the prescription opioid and heroin epidemic. My Administration has been doing everything we can to increase access to treatment, but it won’t be enough without more resources from Congress. That’s why I have called on Congress to provide $1.1 billion in new funding to help ensure that all Americans who want treatment for an opioid use disorder can get the help they need. Unfortunately, Congress has repeatedly failed to provide these resources. Congress needs to act quickly because lives are at stake.

  My Administration is committed to promoting evidence-based strategies to combat substance use disorders, and to reforming the criminal justice system to address unfair sentencing disparities and provide alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent, justice-involved individuals with substance use disorders. Recovery can transform individuals, families, and communities.

  Thank you, again, for taking the time to write. With access to treatment and other supports, recovery is possible for American with substance use disorders, and I will continue to work alongside you until we achieve this reality.

  Sincerely,

  Barack Obama

  CHAPTER 14

  The Writing Team

  “Back from the OVAL” was what the stamp said on the letters Obama had read. They were returned in batches to OPC, and most had some kind of notation in the margins. “What’s going on here?” the president may have written, which meant he was requesting a follow-up memo from staff with some broader context—say, in response to a teenager dealing with a trend he didn’t understand. He might write, “DOJ, can we help?” which meant he wanted the staff to reach out to the Justice Department to look into the situation by doing something like making sure an inmate was getting the medications he needed. Or he could simply write “REPLY,” and if he did that, he would offer notes in the margins for the writing team to use as guidelines for how to respond in his name.

  The writing team was not easy to find. They worked in the attic, up on the fifth floor of the EEOB—where most of the elevators didn’t go; you had to take a back staircase. It was a tight space with low, slanted ceilings; tiny windows set back in alcoves; people tucked into corners staring into glowing screens. “Even people in the White House don’t know this office exists,” one of the writers said to me.

  They were the elves of the operation. Every thank-you note, gift acknowledgment, condolence letter, congratulations greeting—every piece of typed correspondence with the president’s signature on it (the notes in longhand were authored by the president himself) came from the writing team, nine people in all. Perhaps the heaviest lift for the shop was composing the form letters that were sent automatically and in accordance with the way incoming mail was coded. All the form responses the team wrote—more than a hundred of them dealing with specific subject areas like immigration, race relations, climate change—had to be continually updated in accordance with the news cycle, policy changes, topics covered in presidential speeches. Each week a group would comb through and revise the letters, while another, the “conditional language tech team,” constantly tweaked algorithms they had designed to allow for personal touches. So, for example, a teacher writing about immigration reform would get the immigration letter, with an added thank-you for his or her service to students; a recent retiree writing about climate change would get the climate change letter and a “best wishes on your retirement.” The algorithms allowed for hundreds of combinations.

  The goal was to make sure that everyone who wrote a letter to the president got something of substance back. If people believed in this president enough to write to him, that belief needed to be nurtured. The underlying assumption for the writing team was that this president did care. If you didn’t hold that notion at your core, you wouldn’t last. Fiona was at the helm, maintaining quality control and constantly singing her song: This matters. She tracked reader responses to the form letters, organized those into “smile” and “frown” files so the team could gauge its own success rate. “So if someone writes, ‘Thank you for the acknowledgment of the death of my mother; your letter really meant a lot,’ that goes into the smile file,” she told me. “Then another person may write to say, ‘Your letter about Syria didn’t answer my concern.’ That’s a frown.”

  Nobody wanted a frown. Everybody wanted a smile. Everything needed to be perfect. The formatting, the margins, avoiding extra paragraph breaks and random periods, the address label, the printing—it all fell on the writing team, and no detail was too small. This may have been a form letter, but this was a form letter from the president. This would be one citizen’s proof. It might end up in a frame, hung on someone’s wall—passed down to children and to grandchildren. This was an artifact, a piece of American history.

  * * *

  —

  Kolbie Blume was the person on the writing team in charge of answering the 10LADs. If Obama wrote “REPLY” and scrawled notes in the margins of a letter, that meant a personal response had to be created, and those all went to her.

/>   She had a separate office. “I’m not the youngest person here,” she said when she got up to greet me, as if to preempt an all-too-familiar conversation. She had the clean, unadorned look of an adolescent: a neat, short bob; a buttoned-up top with pearls. She was twenty-three. “This is my first job out of college,” she said. “I mean, it’s a lot of pressure.” She’d been at it for two years already.

  It took me a moment to do the calculations. Kolbie would not even have been eligible to vote when Obama was first elected; she would have been in high school. “Basically, my job is to channel the leader of the free world,” she said. “I’m doing my best to be…him,” she said, adding, appropriately I thought, “um.”

  I asked her how she’d learned to write in President Obama’s voice.

  “Listening to speeches, mostly,” she said, sitting down at her desk and motioning for me to take a seat too. She said Obama’s speeches were a thing for her, ever since she was a kid back in Utah, standing in front of the living room TV. “The way he could master words, the way he phrased ideas…” She had never bothered listening to a politician before. Those blah-blah talking heads were for her parents or for other people, not her. But this guy was different. He’s talking to me. She wanted to learn about him, began reading his books. He was somewhat dangerous: a Democrat. The novelty factor alone could have been part of the appeal. Had she ever met a Democrat before? Did Utah even have any? She fell for the cadence and rhythm of his sentences. “The way he could so eloquently, so powerfully, and so poignantly say something and move people to tears.” She became a closet Democrat, then an out one.

  “I was so excited to vote for the first time in 2012,” she told me. “And I remember my boyfriend was like, ‘Why? What good is it going to do?’ It struck such a chord with me. Something that I’d been so excited for, and here there were so many people so jaded; they didn’t think one vote was going to make a difference.

  “I mean, you could argue that my one vote in 2012 didn’t really help anything. One Democrat in a totally Republican district. Well, it helped me. Because I felt empowered. I remember getting the sticker. ‘I voted.’ I put it on the back of my phone case, I was so proud of it.”

  The sticker had barely worn off by the time she arrived at the White House two months later, just before Obama’s second inauguration, having secured an internship through Utah State, where she was majoring in literary studies. “And I just remember my phone case was still all gummy—”

  I was still trying to catch up with the fact that a person this young was the one who wrote all the personal letters that went out with the president’s signature on them.

  “I love my job,” she said.

  It turned out that a steady diet of Obama’s speeches made you especially talented at this sort of work. “You listen to so many speeches, you just have a running commentary in your head,” she said. OPC interns with ambition and drive would routinely apply for staff openings once their internships were completed; Kolbie was just one of many following that path. Fiona recognized her knack early on, hired her to be part of the writing team, and soon put her in charge of the 10LADs portfolio.

  “When I draft a letter, I’ll sit and read it out loud,” she said, trying to explain her methodology. “I’ll hear what kind of inflections the president would have. If it sounds like him, I know it’s right. If it doesn’t, then I’ll try to make it so it does.

  “I wish I could tell you exactly how to do that, but…I just do it every day.”

  She gave me an example. A letter from a woman in Tulsa sitting on top of her day’s to-do pile. “So my job is to take what the president wanted to say to this person,” she said, holding it up, “and turn it into the custom response that every letter writer deserves but that the president wanted this particular constituent to have.” The letter was about a shooting—a white cop had fatally shot an unarmed black man who, according to the letter, was seen raising his hands above his head in videos released after the shooting. The woman was outraged; she wanted to know why Obama wasn’t doing more to repair the growing tensions between police and people in African American communities.

  Fiona had chosen it as one of the 10LADs, and the president had read it. He wrote “REPLY” on top, and down one margin he wrote, “I’m mad, too.” He underlined various sentences, added exclamation points in the margin, various squiggles, and a few other brief comments.

  “See?” Kolbie said, pointing to one of Obama’s exclamation points. “See this right here? And this over here—” The markings Obama had scrawled on the letter may have been sparse, but Kolbie understood the code.

  She turned to her computer, pulled up a draft of the response she had been working on. It was a Word doc with an array of annotations in rainbow colors running down the side. Footnote everything—that was Kolbie’s motto. If she was quoting Obama verbatim from his scrawling on the letter, she would indicate it; if she had borrowed language from a speech he had given on the topic, or another letter on the topic, or a town-hall conversation about the topic, she would indicate those things. She had made it her habit to constantly search through the archives on Whitehouse.gov to gather bits of Obama’s language to use in letters. In the end, crafting the responses in his name was one part deciphering, one part collating, and one megadose of confidence that you were just the person to inhabit the mind of the leader of the free world and put this thing together right.

  I asked her where she got the confidence.

  She grabbed her pearls and twirled them. “It’s so easy to think linearly,” she said. “Like, okay, here’s a person who wrote about climate change, so let’s just plunk in some language about climate change here.” She said those attempts were all duds. Fiona, the grand pooh-bah of quality control, would toss those right back to her, saying, “No,” and “Try again,” and “You’re not nailing this.” Fiona needed to remind Kolbie that this was a person she was writing to. And the president was a person.

  “And I vividly remember, almost like an epiphany,” Kolbie told me. “It was like one day I just got it.” Every letter coming from the president was ultimately a variation on the same theme, she realized. “It’s: ‘Look, I hear you. You exist, and you’re important, and I care about your voice.’ ”

  I thought about how that underlying message, not cynical, not fancy, not loaded—no baggage—was perhaps best kept in the protective arms of a person not far from childhood.

  Kolbie flipped through the pile of letters she needed to get through that afternoon, about fifteen in all. Back from the OVAL, Back from the OVAL, Back from the OVAL, REPLY, REPLY, REPLY. “A few of these will be easy,” she said, pulling out one. A person was writing to give advice to the president on what he should do after he retires. “ ‘Ride a bike daily. Volunteer. Don’t be afraid to day-drink. Go out to lunch as often as possible with Mrs. Obama.’ ” The president had written little more than “Thanks for the great advice!” in his comments. “I’ll probably flesh that out a little,” Kolbie said. “I remember recently he joked about wanting to take three or four months to sleep; maybe I’ll incorporate some of that language—”

  She pulled out another letter. A woman was writing to apologize; she had first written to Obama years earlier accusing him of being anti-Christian. Now she was writing again, having had a change of heart, and saying she was sorry. Obama wrote “REPLY” on top, and along the side: “Thanks for being thoughtful and open to ideas. I’m sure you will do well.”

  “I have not drafted this one yet,” Kolbie said. “But it won’t be much more than what he said here. It just needs…what he said there.” She put it back in the stack, fanned through some of the others. “And you know, the vast majority of these start by people saying, ‘I know my letter will never reach you,’ ” she said. “Or ‘I’m sure some staffer will just toss this letter in the trash.’ So for me, knowing that the person is going to get a response, knowing that their cynici
sm or their disillusionment is going to be chipped away just a little bit—that feels like a victory.”

  I thought about some of the letter writers I had met and what getting a personal letter back from Obama meant to them.

  I thought about Shane Darby, who wrote to howl in the aftermath of his daughter’s suicide; the thing that soothed him about the president’s response was seeing the president spell Cristina’s name right. “Most people put the h in there.”

  I thought about Donna Coltharp, an attorney in San Antonio, Texas, who wrote a letter of thanks to the president for commuting the two life sentences of her client. What moved Donna was that the president thought to thank her for her service as a public defender. “No one ever thanks us.”

  I thought of Bob Melton, a guy in North Carolina who wrote in 2014 to thank Obama for the Affordable Care Act; it enabled him to see a doctor for the first time in twelve years. The president wrote back, and Bob Melton showed the letter to everyone. “I couldn’t believe it! I immediately jumped in the car and went down to Walmart and bought a frame.” He got invited to the Burke County, North Carolina, Democratic Party meeting to come read President Obama’s letter out loud, and everyone clapped, and so now other local groups are asking him to come read it for them too. “I’m just overwhelmed by the whole situation. I mean, little old me, you know? Down here in North Carolina. You know? I never thought I’d get any kind of applause.” Because of that letter, Bob Melton will tell you, he now walks as a tall man.