President George Washington received about five letters a day and answered them all himself. By the end of the 19th century President William McKinley was so overwhelmed by the volume of mail — 100 letters a day — that he hired someone to manage the flow. Thus began what is now called the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). According to Jeanne Marie Laskas, however, it wasn’t until Barack Obama that a president committed himself to reading a set number of letters a day — the ten LADs, as they became known — from ordinary Americans.
Before delving into Obama’s old mailbags Laskas talks to one of his senior advisers, Shailagh Murray. It is October 2016, a month before the presidential election, and while waiting for Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory Murray muses on the LADs. ‘They became a kind of life force in this place,’ she says. ‘It’s this dialogue he’s been having with the country that people aren’t even aware of. Collectively, you get this kind of American tableau.’
Laskas reprints dozens of the LADs, and some of the president’s replies. A 2009 letter from Natoma Canfield, a cancer survivor from Ohio, is a riot of exclamation marks: ‘I need your health reform bill to help me!!! I simply can no longer afford to pay for my health care costs!!’ Obama had it framed and hung in the corridor between his private study and the Oval Office. ‘These,’ says Murray, ‘are the voices in the president’s head.’ The 2014 State of the Union address was inspired by a letter from the unimprovably named Misty DeMars, who had been laid off because of budget cuts just after buying a house on a big mortgage.
Shriek marks notwithstanding, many of the letters feel like relics from another era, a time before Twitter insults became the lingua franca of everyday political discourse.
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