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A review by jwsg
To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope by Jeanne Marie Laskas
4.0
Obama certainly wasn’t the first POTUS to take an interest in constituent mail. He wasn’t the first to request to see the mail (Clinton “wanted to see a representative stack every few weeks”); he wasn’t the first to reply personally to mail (Reagan “answered dozens of letters on weekends”). But he was the first POTUS with a systematic and comprehensive approach to dealing with constituent mail. To Obama, with love, joy, anger, and hope tells the story of the White House staff behind that system, some of the constituents who wrote to Obama, and Obama’s own relationship with constituent mail.
Obama committed to reading ten letters a day when he first took office (so long as he wasn’t travelling). So by 5pm each day, staff from the Office of Presidential Correspondence (comprising some 50 staff members, 36 interns, and a rotating roster of three hundred volunteers) would select the so-called “10LADs” from the ten thousand letters and messages addressed to Obama each day. These would be added to the back of the briefing book Obama took with him to the residence each night. And from 2010 onwards, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. From 2011, every word of every email factored into the creation of a daily word cloud and its image would be distributed around the White House to give policy makers and staffers a sense of things that were top most on constituents’ minds.
How is it even remotely possible to curate 10 letters from ten thousand? Every letter that comes in is read by a human and coded in pencil with a “disposition” – is the letter about gun violence? Healthcare? Taxes? Domestic violence? Personal trauma? A letter from a kid? A request for a birthday greeting? Code the letters then sort them into the relevant shelves. Write “sample” on the letter if you want it to be considered for inclusion in the 10LADs. About 2 percent of the total incoming mail – about two or three hundred letters a day – end up in the sample bin. What’s the bar for sampling? Simply this – does the letter move you in some particular way?
How did it all begin? Obama points at Pete Rouse, his right-hand man, who helped engineer his ascent to the White House. Rouse told Obama that he needed to make sure he had a good correspondence office that would make constituents feel that they were being heard and responded to. Rouse’s perspective was that if someone cared enough to sit down and write a letter, then “the elected official ought to pay attention to it”. The letter was often the only direct contact that an individual citizen would have with his or her elected official and “the quality of the communication says something about how the elected official views his or her role in terms of serving the public, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy”. Rouse acknowledged that like most people, he was probably more focused on finding Osama bin Laden than on answering an individual letter from Montana. But he made “a conscious priority to find good people to work in the [OPC], and that it was important, and that the president and senior people understood that it was important”.
And so the OPC was born. Mike Kelleher from Obama’s Senate office volunteered for the job. He wrote the OPC mission statement (“to listen to the American people, to understand their stories and concerns and respond on behalf of the president”), did up the org chart, screened and hired applicants. He wrote algorithms for the mail coding system, set up the casework decision tree, created the library of policy response letters. Amazing.
I’d read Michelle Obama’s Becoming a couple of months ago. It was a powerfully written book, about the improbable ascent of a black man to the White House. To Obama is a subtler book but is equally powerful in its own way. It gives a sense of Obama’s idealism and sense of purpose, not through his own story, but through the voices of those he has attracted to work for him, their motivations and their convictions:
“A lot of people who worked in OPC would tell me that. The hardmail room was where you went when the rest of your job got difficult, or annoying, or boring. It had a way of re-centering you, reminding you why you were here. Sit down and read. The bins were never empty. America had a lot to say, and without you, there would be no one to listen.”
It’s easy to see constituent mail and feedback as a pain, a chore, a burden to be borne without losing focus on the truly important parts of the job. Or that constituent mail is something to be handled by poorly paid support staff (think the equivalent of customer service agents in the private sector). Everyone will tell you it’s an important function but it’s not where you put your talent. But Obama and his team reframe constituent mail. Constituent mail was a reminder that they weren’t dealing with impersonal issues but with complex individuals and communities. The letters were “access”, giving voice to people who would otherwise have no voice (e.g. inmates, the poor). They were “emotion, context, and narrative”. All the things you might forget if you let yourself get caught up in political “sausage making”. They were the “human side of the story, the ideas you can’t squeeze into a briefing memo or translate into bar graphs or dots on a chart”. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longest serving senior advisor, saw the letters as “a kind of nourishment”; she would sometimes pick up the phone and call a person whose letter had moved her.
But the reality is also that Obama’s staffers and administration cared about the mail because their boss, a former community organizer, cared about the mail and the people and stories they represented. “If you didn’t appreciate the mail, you wouldn’t have lasted. In Obama world, letters were part of the deal.” So whether you truly cared about the mail or were made to care about it, you paid attention – you’d asked to be put on the distribution list; the letters would inform your policy conversations.
The book is eye opening in other ways. In a typical bureaucracy, who would you expect to oversee the OPC, to be in charge of selecting the 10LADs for Obama? Laskas imagined Fiona Reeves to be “an old lady with a beehive hairdo, tiny glasses at the end of a drooping chain resting on a magnificent bosom, and a bulbous chin sprouting random whiskers that shook as she barked”. Ok, maybe not someone straight out of a Roald Dahl story book. But definitely someone middle-aged, who has worked their way up the ranks of the bureaucracy, who has seen that, done that, and is perhaps a little jaded from a lifetime of working the system? But Fiona Reeves hadn’t even hit 30 when she first headed up the OPC in 2013. She joined the OPC as an “analyst”, i.e. she read the constituent mail, scanning, coding and sampling them, having worked as a field organizer for Obama’s campaign before that. So not a mature career bureaucrat, then. But an earnest, idealistic, empathetic 20-something who believed in Obama, who believed that her work could and did make a difference. Reeves doesn’t see her job as handling the mail. She’s giving the President access to the stories he needs to hear, stories that he can’t access on his own. To Reeves, the letters are “a periscope looking outside the bubble…a way for him to see as he used to see, before Secret Service protection and armoured vehicles and a press pool and the world watching”. Fiona is a curator and she doesn’t just select the 10LADs; the letters have to be placed in just the right order to create a certain narrative.
And then there’s Obama’s writing team in the OPC, the people who write every thank you note, every gift acknowledgement, condolence letter, every form letter on immigration/drugs/race relation/gun violence, etc on behalf of Obama. It’s so easy to send out a form letter that sounds exactly like a form letter. “Thank you for your note.” But what does it mean to write in a way that conveys that the president cares, that your letter mattered, that your belief in the president was not misplaced? We learn about Kolbie Blume, the person on the writing team in charge of answering the 10LADs. She’s in her first job out of college. And her job is to channel Obama in her replies. The belief and faith in the power of youth in the Obama administration – that people with not much life experience but a good head on their shoulders and a great deal of heart can do big things – is amazing. In one of Laskas’s interviews with Obama, he describes the OPC culture as one “that we tried to develop early on in the campaign…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.”
Perhaps To Obama can be described as a book that’s ultimately about connection. Starting from Obama’s belief that “everybody’s got a sacred story….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] that’s the glue around which democracies work”. To his team’s belief that their job was to connect the president to the people, to channel the voices of America to the president. And to do their job, they themselves needed that capacity to connect, that “capacity to occupy a stranger’s head and heart”. A lovely read (though somewhat depressing in the current political context.)
Obama committed to reading ten letters a day when he first took office (so long as he wasn’t travelling). So by 5pm each day, staff from the Office of Presidential Correspondence (comprising some 50 staff members, 36 interns, and a rotating roster of three hundred volunteers) would select the so-called “10LADs” from the ten thousand letters and messages addressed to Obama each day. These would be added to the back of the briefing book Obama took with him to the residence each night. And from 2010 onwards, all physical mail was scanned and preserved. From 2011, every word of every email factored into the creation of a daily word cloud and its image would be distributed around the White House to give policy makers and staffers a sense of things that were top most on constituents’ minds.
How is it even remotely possible to curate 10 letters from ten thousand? Every letter that comes in is read by a human and coded in pencil with a “disposition” – is the letter about gun violence? Healthcare? Taxes? Domestic violence? Personal trauma? A letter from a kid? A request for a birthday greeting? Code the letters then sort them into the relevant shelves. Write “sample” on the letter if you want it to be considered for inclusion in the 10LADs. About 2 percent of the total incoming mail – about two or three hundred letters a day – end up in the sample bin. What’s the bar for sampling? Simply this – does the letter move you in some particular way?
How did it all begin? Obama points at Pete Rouse, his right-hand man, who helped engineer his ascent to the White House. Rouse told Obama that he needed to make sure he had a good correspondence office that would make constituents feel that they were being heard and responded to. Rouse’s perspective was that if someone cared enough to sit down and write a letter, then “the elected official ought to pay attention to it”. The letter was often the only direct contact that an individual citizen would have with his or her elected official and “the quality of the communication says something about how the elected official views his or her role in terms of serving the public, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy”. Rouse acknowledged that like most people, he was probably more focused on finding Osama bin Laden than on answering an individual letter from Montana. But he made “a conscious priority to find good people to work in the [OPC], and that it was important, and that the president and senior people understood that it was important”.
And so the OPC was born. Mike Kelleher from Obama’s Senate office volunteered for the job. He wrote the OPC mission statement (“to listen to the American people, to understand their stories and concerns and respond on behalf of the president”), did up the org chart, screened and hired applicants. He wrote algorithms for the mail coding system, set up the casework decision tree, created the library of policy response letters. Amazing.
I’d read Michelle Obama’s Becoming a couple of months ago. It was a powerfully written book, about the improbable ascent of a black man to the White House. To Obama is a subtler book but is equally powerful in its own way. It gives a sense of Obama’s idealism and sense of purpose, not through his own story, but through the voices of those he has attracted to work for him, their motivations and their convictions:
“A lot of people who worked in OPC would tell me that. The hardmail room was where you went when the rest of your job got difficult, or annoying, or boring. It had a way of re-centering you, reminding you why you were here. Sit down and read. The bins were never empty. America had a lot to say, and without you, there would be no one to listen.”
It’s easy to see constituent mail and feedback as a pain, a chore, a burden to be borne without losing focus on the truly important parts of the job. Or that constituent mail is something to be handled by poorly paid support staff (think the equivalent of customer service agents in the private sector). Everyone will tell you it’s an important function but it’s not where you put your talent. But Obama and his team reframe constituent mail. Constituent mail was a reminder that they weren’t dealing with impersonal issues but with complex individuals and communities. The letters were “access”, giving voice to people who would otherwise have no voice (e.g. inmates, the poor). They were “emotion, context, and narrative”. All the things you might forget if you let yourself get caught up in political “sausage making”. They were the “human side of the story, the ideas you can’t squeeze into a briefing memo or translate into bar graphs or dots on a chart”. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s longest serving senior advisor, saw the letters as “a kind of nourishment”; she would sometimes pick up the phone and call a person whose letter had moved her.
But the reality is also that Obama’s staffers and administration cared about the mail because their boss, a former community organizer, cared about the mail and the people and stories they represented. “If you didn’t appreciate the mail, you wouldn’t have lasted. In Obama world, letters were part of the deal.” So whether you truly cared about the mail or were made to care about it, you paid attention – you’d asked to be put on the distribution list; the letters would inform your policy conversations.
The book is eye opening in other ways. In a typical bureaucracy, who would you expect to oversee the OPC, to be in charge of selecting the 10LADs for Obama? Laskas imagined Fiona Reeves to be “an old lady with a beehive hairdo, tiny glasses at the end of a drooping chain resting on a magnificent bosom, and a bulbous chin sprouting random whiskers that shook as she barked”. Ok, maybe not someone straight out of a Roald Dahl story book. But definitely someone middle-aged, who has worked their way up the ranks of the bureaucracy, who has seen that, done that, and is perhaps a little jaded from a lifetime of working the system? But Fiona Reeves hadn’t even hit 30 when she first headed up the OPC in 2013. She joined the OPC as an “analyst”, i.e. she read the constituent mail, scanning, coding and sampling them, having worked as a field organizer for Obama’s campaign before that. So not a mature career bureaucrat, then. But an earnest, idealistic, empathetic 20-something who believed in Obama, who believed that her work could and did make a difference. Reeves doesn’t see her job as handling the mail. She’s giving the President access to the stories he needs to hear, stories that he can’t access on his own. To Reeves, the letters are “a periscope looking outside the bubble…a way for him to see as he used to see, before Secret Service protection and armoured vehicles and a press pool and the world watching”. Fiona is a curator and she doesn’t just select the 10LADs; the letters have to be placed in just the right order to create a certain narrative.
And then there’s Obama’s writing team in the OPC, the people who write every thank you note, every gift acknowledgement, condolence letter, every form letter on immigration/drugs/race relation/gun violence, etc on behalf of Obama. It’s so easy to send out a form letter that sounds exactly like a form letter. “Thank you for your note.” But what does it mean to write in a way that conveys that the president cares, that your letter mattered, that your belief in the president was not misplaced? We learn about Kolbie Blume, the person on the writing team in charge of answering the 10LADs. She’s in her first job out of college. And her job is to channel Obama in her replies. The belief and faith in the power of youth in the Obama administration – that people with not much life experience but a good head on their shoulders and a great deal of heart can do big things – is amazing. In one of Laskas’s interviews with Obama, he describes the OPC culture as one “that we tried to develop early on in the campaign…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.”
Perhaps To Obama can be described as a book that’s ultimately about connection. Starting from Obama’s belief that “everybody’s got a sacred story….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] that’s the glue around which democracies work”. To his team’s belief that their job was to connect the president to the people, to channel the voices of America to the president. And to do their job, they themselves needed that capacity to connect, that “capacity to occupy a stranger’s head and heart”. A lovely read (though somewhat depressing in the current political context.)