When he entered The White House, newly elected President Barak Obama asked for ten letters.
At the time The White House received 65,000 paper and 100,000 email letters – to say nothing of phone calls and faxes – weekly. Obama asked his correspondence staff to sift through them and choose – daily – the ten most meaningful ones they felt the President should read, representing all different sides of the American experience.
“Lately I’ve been getting a lot of health care letters, and this one is a good example,” Obama said, reading one about a family whose retirement funds were being drained as they supported a son who could not afford the cost of his insurance premiums because of a preexisting condition.
Another letter contained a photograph of a vegetable garden that a woman had sent, showing the president how she had used her stimulus payment.
And then there was the letter written during World War II.
“My dearest daughter,” it began, as the father, newly deployed, described to his newborn daughter what he was doing and why it was so important to him. And to the country.
“These letters do more, I think, to keep me in touch with what’s happening around the country than just about anything else,” the president said.