I would normally try not to link to anything written by Jake Tapper, but he has a very interesting post up about President Obama actually reading personally, letters sent to him from people like you and me. It's titled Dear President Obama
The post gives some back story on how the Mortgage Package was shaped. It started with a letter from a desperate homeowner in Arizona:
The letter to President Obama came from a woman in Arizona whose husband lost his job. He was able to find work, but the new gig came with one-third the pay; the family is struggling to make their mortgage payments.
The letter from the Arizona woman illustrated a policy conundrum, recalled senior adviser David Axelrod. President Obama read it, and absorbed the lesson.
"She said they had made all their mortgage payments, but were running out of money," Axelrod said. "And they were told they could not renegotiate unless they were delinquent in their payments."
According to the article, Obama made copies of the letter and passed it around to his staff in order to not lose site of the the people that hired him. These are the people he's working for, not the Dems or Repubs in Congress, but us. We the People:
"He had been struck by how powerful the story was," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "He wanted us as we were creating policy to make sure that we were listening and hearing these examples as well."
But the story doesn't stop there. President Obama is given a special purple folder that contain 10 letters each week, from ordinary citizens like you and me, and reads them personally. And he even responds to some of them personally.
In his first week in office, President Obama requested that he see 10 letters a day "representative of people's concerns, from people writing into the president," recalls Gibbs, "to help get him outside of the bubble, to get more than just the information you get as an elected official."
Says Axelrod, "he did it because his greatest concern is getting isolated in the White House, away from the experiences of the American people...The letters impact him greatly."
President Obama IS listening to us. He refuses to live in that bubble that encased George W. Bush for 8 years. We may disagree with him on some policy issues, but dang people, can you imagine G.W. reading a citizens letter that wasn't sanitized for loyalty by one of his aides? I am so damn proud of my President. He likes us, he really likes us!!