The 22-Year-Old Who Wrote Barack Obama’s Letters

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From The Atlantic:

In a small office on the top floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a young woman sat at a desk covered with letters to the president of the United States. There were hundreds, each stamped with back from the oval and crowned at the top with “Reply” in Barack Obama’s handwriting.

Most White House staff members didn’t even know of this tiny office, accessible primarily by staircase and home to the writing team for the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). Composed of nine staff members—a very small portion of the overall OPC—the writing team was in charge of answering the 10,000 letters and messages that arrived each day for the president.

While the majority of these letter writers received personalized form letters, 10 of them were chosen for Obama’s daily reading and, depending on the president’s wishes, required a personal reply, a process Jeanne Marie Laskas describes in a new book, to be published next month, To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope. Laskas pulls back the curtain on this impressive letter-writing machine to reveal not a wizard but a would-be Dorothy, Kolbie Blume. In her first job out of college, swamped at her desk with letters to the president in need of reply, Blume served as the president’s voice.

Her job, as Blume explained to me in a recent interview, was to understand not only the letter writer, but also how the president must have felt reading the letter, which she often gathered from punctuation he added or sentences he underlined. She didn’t consider herself “the voice of the president,” but rather someone who pulled together Obama’s language from his books, speeches, letters, and other material, trying to achieve a tone, not unlike her own, that combined the president’s idealism and humility. Her official bureaucratic title, from August 2015 to the end of Obama’s second term, in January 2017: director of writing for sampled correspondence. In other words, Blume wrote personal letters to citizens on behalf of the president, responding to the sacred 10 letters a day, or 10lads in the parlance of the OPC, that Obama read religiously each night.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

5 thoughts on “The 22-Year-Old Who Wrote Barack Obama’s Letters”

  1. Of COURSE Democrats writing to Obama would be fooled into believing that a response written by an inexperienced 22-year-old was actually written by Obama himself.

    • Tells ya what they really/actually expected out of him …

      Next we’ll hear that Trump is actually just re-tweeting things a pair of 15-year-olds are sending him … 😉

  2. Personalized form letters are a thing. You agree on boilerplate paragraphs with the principal (and maybe his lawyer or execs), then fit them together as needed. If something needs true personalization, the principal is consulted.

    The system described instead is pretty exploitative. That poor kid was made to work her butt off, for no good reason. If the letters were important, Obama should have been composing or dictating them. A secretary is not in charge of creative writing.

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