The romance of ten letters a day

(meme) Political Punch:

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."

Before President Obama's housing speech last week, he'd made copies of his letter and "sent it to his financial team and said, 'This is the kind of person our housing plan should help," Axelrod recalled.

[...] Every day President Barack Obama is handed a special purple folder. The folder contains ten letters, and every day President Obama takes time to read them.

[...] these letters have been culled from the thousands the White House Correspondence Office receives each day from Americans who have taken the time to sit down and write to their president.

[...] 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."

[...] Monday through Friday the head of White House Correspondence delivers ten letters to be read by the President, choosing among letters that are broadly representative of the day’s news and issues; ones that are broadly representative of President’s intake of current mail, phone calls to the comment line, and faxes from citizens; and messages that are particularly compelling.

This is what FDR did, and it seems...very romantic. I've gotten the feeling several times over the past few months.  On balance I find the change to be welcome; certainly far better than the despair of the Bush years.  And we all do seem to need some extra hope during these rough times.

Whenever I begin to think this way I remind myself of Wilkinson's romance post from after Election day:

Every four years, I find myself deeply disturbed by the fact that the office of chief executive of the national public goods administration agency is in fact, according to most people’s sense of things, the highest peak, the top of the heap. And the quadrennial reflex of vesting in a single powerful man so much hope for the future seems to me a truly depressing failure to internalize the spirit of American democracy. Last night’s celebratory catharsis was a long time coming. We needed it. But, frankly, I hope never to see again streets thronging with people chanting the victorious leader’s name.

The government of the state is profoundly important. And I think American voters picked a competent, decent, and sober executive officer. But this is not, headline writers, Barack Obama’s America. He is not your leader, any more than the mayor of your town is your leader. We are free people. We lead ourselves. He is set to be a high-ranking public administrator. Sure, there is romance in fame. But romance in politics is dangerous, misplaced, and beneath intelligent people. Were we more fully civilized, we would tolerate the yearnings projected on our leaders. Our tribal nature is not so easily escaped, after all. But we would try to escape it. We would discourage and condemn as irresponsible a romantic politics that tells us that if we all come together and want it hard enough, we’ll get it. We would spot the dangerous fallacy in condemning as “cynicism” all serious attempts to critically evaluate the content of political hopes.

I don’t say this to pick on Obama in particular. He’s a politican. Romance and elevation are crucial to winning a ruling coalition. They are tools. But smart people ought to be able to see through romance and elevation to the point of it all: the power to compel. McCain’s even worse with the “fight cynicism through glorious collective commitment” crap, which is one reason I’m glad he lost. The point is, Obama’s a politician, and politics is what it is: a ritualized and contained conflict over power. That’s not something to romanticize.

Is it possible to be romantic yet reality-based, hopeful yet critical, to have a very high respect without descending into Bush supporters' neo-monarchism or Palinite dementia...and, as Reagan would say: trust but verify? I try.

There are plenty of journalists and commentators who make a conscious effort every day to report as objectively as practical (or at least, will sell newspapers). And there are plenty of pundits and ideologues who almost always support their "side".

In this journal I try to moderate a mix of the two...to be a good cognitive citizen without being too rigid and angsty in advocating my libertarianism... which, like Wilkinson's, is disturbed by the lofty respect awarded to the the States' chief executive officer.