To Obama

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  At that point in his postpresidency, well over a year in, he had done just three interviews: one about his early days as a community organizer, another that brought David Letterman out of retirement, and a third with Prince Harry.

  And now he would do one more: a conversation about the mailroom.

  The mailroom, with the mail lady.

  It’s not as if he and Fiona were pals, not by a long stretch. The divide between a president and the person running the mailroom was, well, a metaphor all on its own. A king and a servant, a rock star and a roadie, a president and the mail lady. If Fiona and Obama had any kind of relationship, it was largely a silent one, restricted to a purple folder in the back of his daily briefing book, an archived sample of voices, a smattering of responses scribbled in margins: REPLY, REPLY, REPLY. I remembered what Fiona had said: It was like passing a tray under a door.

  She and Obama had met a few times previously, mostly for photo ops, and he had called her over to the Oval Office during the last days of his presidency to thank her for her service. She told me she had been nervous for that meeting too. “I thought a lot about how I wanted to thank him, and then you walk in, and he completely throws you off, and you don’t remember what you were going to say. He gave me a letter. He had folded it, and that’s not normal. We don’t fold his letters.

  “He talked about the unglamorous part of the White House, the idea of service at its core.” Then he gave her a hug. “He’s a hugger,” she said.

  I asked her about a letter she had once written to him. It came out of a session at an OPC staff retreat as part of an “empathy-building exercise.” The prompt was, “If you wrote to the president, what would you say?” The staff broke into small groups and shared their letters with one another. The point wasn’t for the president to ever get those letters. Fiona had thrown hers in a folder, and that was the end of it.

  Maybe she wanted to give it to him today?

  “Oh, he doesn’t need that,” she said brusquely, and then she busied herself with her coat and marched toward the door, and she took in a deep gulp of air, let it out slowly.

  Again I asked her why she was nervous. “What’s the worst thing that could happen? You’ll be speechless? You’ll say something you’ll regret?”

  She stood still for a moment, looked at me. I’d forgotten how big and round her eyes were; a person could climb inside those eyes.

  “I’ll cry?” she said. She reached into her coat pocket, showed me the wads of rolled-up toilet paper she had thought to arm herself with before she left the house.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” I grabbed a fistful of proper tissues from the bathroom, folded them, and handed them to her.

  * * *

  —

  The suite was bright, airy, and colorful. Large images of the Pacific Ocean adorned the waiting area, along with knickknacks of distinction—the set of Muhammad Ali boxing gloves he used to have on display in the Oval Office dining room, a replica Vince Lombardi Trophy. Heading down the wide center hall toward Obama’s office brought you steadily closer to a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr., featured prominently at the end. The image was of King’s back as he stood before a crowd—the point of view of the speaker, not the listener.

  Many of the staffers, about twelve in all, had worked for Obama in the White House, and most of them knew Fiona; people stepped out of their offices to greet her: “How’s Chris? How’s the baby?” And Obama appeared just like the rest of them, like any old worker taking a break; suddenly he was with us, smiling wide, saying he had just finished filling out his March Madness brackets and was feeling good about them, really good. You don’t realize just how lanky he is until you see him in person, a long, flat physique; he looked fit, even youthful, his hair cut super short so that all the new gray he’d famously acquired during his presidency was less pronounced. He walked up to Fiona with his arms outstretched and asked about her family, and she sheepishly stepped in for a hug.

  “I’m great. She’s great. We’re just great….”

  “Well, we’ve got babies popping out,” Obama said, referring to a staffer who was due to deliver any day. “It’s the best thing. I’ve got all these staff who started with me when they were like twenty. And now suddenly it’s like they’ve got kids everywhere. It’s sweet. And a bunch of them, you know, a number of them met on the campaign or at the White House. But nobody yet has named a child Barack—”

  “A lot of letter writers did,” Fiona offered, perhaps too quietly for him to hear.

  “I’m a little frustrated about that,” Obama continued with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Come on, people!’ ”

  We followed him into his office. It was a wide space done in shades of tan and brown, earthy, warm, and welcoming. Zero razzle-dazzle. He offered us a seat on the couch, and he sunk into the chair at the end. He was in jeans and a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the top. He put his feet up on the coffee table, crossed his legs at the ankles; overall this was the portrait of one relaxed man. Pete Souza’s book of photographs was on the coffee table; family pictures were everywhere, on end tables, on the walls; and Obama’s expansive desk on the other side of the room was covered in paper, piles, books—a place of activity. He mentioned the book he’s been working on, said it was…difficult. “Writing is just so hard. Painful. It’s—everybody thinks it’s, you know. But it’s work. It’s like having homework all the time. Yeah, it’s hard.

  “I should mention to you, by the way, Fiona,” he said, as we were getting settled, “we’re still getting like two hundred fifty thousand letters a year. It’s a lot—”

  “I was really excited when Emily told me that you were going to keep getting mail after you were president,” Fiona said. “Because people weren’t just writing to you as president—as sort of like this guy who got elected, so now my problems are his problems. Like, I think people thought that you might believe in them. And so I’m not shocked that they’re continuing to write.”

  I thought Fiona was masking her jitters remarkably well, or else they had already dissipated. She wasn’t the mail lady. He wasn’t a king. I told Obama about Fiona’s image of a tray passing under a door, asked him if he ever had that same sense of a kind of silent relationship with the strangers over there in OPC.

  “One of the things I learned fairly early on about the presidency is that people change around you,” he said. “They’re constantly watching you and measuring your responses, and—you can tilt the field. And so I actually liked the fact that Fiona and the other people in the office were not inhibited or constrained by trying to think about What would he like? or What would he want? But rather they were in some ways helping to channel, through all the sifting that was going on, something that was representative of the mood of the moment, the emotions that were bubbling up through all the mail that was coming in.”

  I noticed that over by his desk, on a wall, he had hung the same framed letter he used to have displayed in the corridor between his private study and the Oval Office. Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Medina, Ohio, had written in 2009 about her ballooning health-insurance premiums; Obama had said she reminded him of his mom, who died at age fifty-two of a similar cancer. The letter had stood as a reminder to him of his commitment to healthcare reform.

  “The only instruction I gave was that I wanted every packet to be representative,” he continued. “And understanding that it wouldn’t be perfect. It didn’t mean that, you know, out of every ten letters, there had to be two positive and two negative and three neutral and one funny. It wasn’t formulaic like that. But that was the one thing I insisted on—that this is not useful to me if all I’m getting are, you know, happy birthday wishes. And I think they did a wonderful job of channeling the American people in that way.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” Fiona said. “It was this big group. And folks in the office came from different backgrounds. We had our volunteer work
force. And there were some old people in the mix too. So we had a lot of people putting stuff forward for you, a lot of people interpreting what ‘representative’ meant.”

  “I will say this does also have to do with a culture that we tried to develop early on in the campaign,” he said. “Which was putting a lot of confidence in a bunch of young people to fairly, meaningfully, and passionately reflect the people they were interacting with. Whether that was on a campaign and they were out there organizing or in the office.”

  That would be a theme that would come up repeatedly during our time together that day. The continuum. The values established in the earliest days of campaigning, maintained and carried forward in the hands of people like Fiona, who may not even have understood, when they first got started, what drew them in.

  * * *

  —

  “So this is Marnie,” I said, placing a file on the coffee table and reaching inside. The folder was filled with some of the letters I hoped to talk about, along with photographs taken during visits with letter writers.

  “I reviewed the letters and the responses in preparation for this meeting,” Obama said. “I didn’t memorize them….” I wondered how to tell him it was okay he didn’t memorize them. (Memorize them?) Here was a guy committed to excellence in homework.

  I reached for a photo and handed it to him. “Marnie Hazelton,” I said. He studied it closely, leaning in. In the photo Marnie was seated behind her big, impressive desk at the Roosevelt Union Free School District administration offices, looking every bit the superintendent.

  “She’s an example of someone who was writing to you for help,” I said. “And your response, the words ‘I’m rooting for you’—she carried them everywhere. She read them out loud to Meredith Vieira on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

  “I didn’t hear that!” he said. “That’s cool.”

  “But she choked. She missed a question. It was ‘Rub-a-Dub-Dub—’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “But now she’s the superintendent of the entire school district!”

  “That’s pretty cool!”

  “I wonder if you have any sense of the power of your responses to these folks,” I said.

  “I think I understood that if somebody writes a letter and they get any kind of response, that there’s a sense of…being heard,” he said, carefully considering my simple question. I knew enough by then to not be surprised by Obama’s exceedingly slow delivery, but that didn’t stop me from continuing to marvel at it. He’s a ponderous man; he is a person who ruminates. It’s not the sort of blathering a person does to hear his own voice or to fulfill some need to command the room; he’s not a mansplainer. He is, rather, thoughtful to the extreme. A person who would memorize homework. His words are precise, and the sentences are…dense. It’s like you could add water to them, and they’d keep expanding.

  “And so often, especially back in 2009, 2010, 2011, a lot of people were going through a lot of hardship,” he said. “And a lot of them felt alone in that hardship. They were losing their homes, or they’re dealing with somebody at the bank and the bank saying, ‘There’s nothing we can do. You’re going to lose your house.’ Or they’ve got a pink slip, and they’ve lost their job, and they’re going to interview after interview after interview. Over time, I think it’s easy for folks to feel a little invisible, as if nobody’s 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 they’d feel a little bit less lonely in those struggles.”

  I wondered if this might be the sort of stuff that made Fiona reach for the tissues. The raw kindness. It’s wonderful to behold it in anyone, let alone to hear that it was a value at the core of a president.

  “Certainly what I learned during the presidency was that the office of the president itself carries enormous weight,” Obama went on. “And, sadly, probably where I learned that best was in moments of tragedy where you’d visit with grieving families. Sometimes they were in places where—I think it’s fair to say—I didn’t get a whole lot of votes. You know, after a tornado or a flood or a shooting. And what was clear was that my presence there signified to those families that they were important. Their loved ones were important. The grief they were feeling was important. That it had been seen and acknowledged.

  “That was fairly consistent throughout my presidency,” he said.

  I thought about President George W. Bush and the ways in which he’d botched that particular presidential duty in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and how damaging his perceived lack of compassion for flood victims was to his entire presidency. I thought about the ways in which Bill Clinton was the opposite; there was a president who glopped it on thick. “I feel your pain,” he’d say, and he did that little bite of his bottom lip. People came to mock him for it, or at least distrust it. Maybe he wasn’t being sincere. Maybe there was nothing behind it. For Clinton, the “maybe” took over.

  I don’t think that happened for Obama. Whatever people thought of his presidency, I think he was given credit for being a man who brought a solid well of empathy to the office.

  But since when did empathy become a requisite trait for a president? Sympathy, the capacity to feel compassion for others, is perhaps the baseline expectation we have of any good neighbor, let alone leader. Obama was the first modern president to explicitly and repeatedly raise that bar. Empathy, he said, in The Audacity of Hope, “is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.”

  In his presidency he would demand it of himself—what was the 10LADs experiment if not a daily reminder to experience the world as others did?—and his expectation seemed to be that a call for empathy would trickle down to those who served in his administration.

  “That notion of being heard,” I said about his response to Marnie’s cry for help. “That message that you matter. It seemed to be embedded throughout all of this.” I told him that Pete Rouse had talked about it, about how it spread through the staff. If the mail mattered, the people reading it mattered. I told Obama it was the message that so many people, so many letter writers and Friends of the Mail, kept hitting when I talked to them. “You matter.”

  “I still believe it,” he said.

  It’s hard to argue with empathy. It’s a deeply admirable trait. It’s Pope Francis. It’s a tenet of Christianity. It’s a mindset religious leaders throughout the world have sought and taught followers to seek.

  It made you a good person. But a good president? Obama had been criticized bitterly by conservatives, in 2009, for perhaps taking the call for empathy too far when he said it was the thing he was looking for in a U.S. Supreme Court justice. “I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying…people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.” Conservatives had called it “the empathy standard”—Obama’s personal litmus test—and said it was an awfully “touchy-feely” reason for choosing Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Empathy,” said Utah senator Orrin Hatch, was “a code word for an activist judge.” They said relying on personal experience would lead judges to reach subjective interpretations of U.S. laws. We’re supposed to have impartial judges sworn to provide equality under the law, independent of the whims of personal preference. The word “empathy” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

  Moreover, Obama’s empathy, you could argue, was what begot Trumpism. Its opposite. We now had a president who seemed to go out of his way to remind us how little he cared about the struggles of the less fortunate.

  Was this simply a style issue? A caring, thoughtful president versus a wild and oafish one? Perhaps leadership styles fell on a continuum, and people oscillated between a preference for one or the ot
her. It’s hard to imagine, though. We don’t want a president who cares about people?

  “Where does this even come from?” I asked Obama—that focus on empathy as a core value for a president.

  “I think this whole letter-writing process and its importance reflected a more fundamental vision of what we were trying to do in the campaign and what I was trying to do with the presidency and my political philosophy,” he said. “The foundational theory, it probably connects to my early days organizing. Just going around and listening to people. Asking them about their lives, and what was important to them. And how did they come to believe what they believe? And what are they trying to pass on to their children?”

  When he talked like that, starting to dig in deep, he didn’t make eye contact. He looked straight ahead, at a spot somewhere near his feet propped up on the coffee table, brown leather boots, like the desert boots the boys I knew in seventh grade used to wear.

  “I learned in that process that if you listen hard enough, everybody’s got a sacred story,” he said. “An organizing story. Of who they are and what their place in the world is. And they’re willing to share it with you if they feel as if you actually care about it. And that ends up being the glue around which relationships are formed, and trust is formed, and communities are formed. And ultimately—my theory was, at least—that’s the glue around which democracies work.”

  “Listening,” I said.