Earlier this year, Barb attended an event for President Obama in St. Louis. I’m pretty sure you only got a hug if you wrote a check but it’s still a nice picture.
I’m not thrilled with everything our president has done (or not done) but if I were, someone else would be pissed, so…
I wish him well.
From The Huffington Post: “In his first week as president, Obama asked his staff to select 10 letters a day for him to read from among the tens of thousands that were flooding into the White House. … Fourteen months later, Obama still takes 10 letters (including e-mails and faxes) with him when he heads upstairs at the end of each weekday. He personally writes back to three or four.”
My suggestion posted here in March of 2008:
“President Obama reads, answers and acts on one email –from an American citizen– every week. Let’s say, on Friday. Here’s how it might work:
Anybody can email the president once a week. Yes, people will try to find ways to scam this but you can deal with that. On Friday morning, 10 emails are selected at random and forwarded to President Obama’s in-box. He looks through them, picks one and responds –personally– to the sender. If action is required, the email is forwarded to the appropriate subordinate who has to DO something because the president –and the country– will be watching.
My suggestion goes a bit further but the two are eerily close. And, yes, I did email my suggestion to the Obama campaign.
Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:
I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.
“Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing. Then he got elected.”
Oh dear. Who’s my favorite political reporter? Who’s the guy I always turn to for the hard, profane truth? That’s right, Matt Taibbi. The graf above is the lead to his latest piece in Rolling Stone. And this, sums it all up:
“What we do know is that Barack Obama pulled a bait-and-switch on us. If it were any other politician, we wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe it’s our fault, for thinking he was different.”
From a post here at smays.com in March, 2008:
“On Friday morning, 10 emails are selected at random and forwarded to President Obama’s in-box. He looks through them, picks one and responds –personally– to the sender.”
And the following from the New York Times in April, 2009:
“Tens of thousands of letters, e-mail messages and faxes arrive at the White House every day. A few hundred are culled and end up each weekday afternoon on a round wooden table in the office of Mike Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence. He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence. Designed to offer a sampling of what Americans are thinking, the letters are read by the president, and he sometimes answers them by hand, in black ink on azure paper.”
If you can find an earlier reference to “my” idea, leave it in the comments. I’m just looking for my props.