It makes sense for you to consider now whether you want to use 2006 to position yourself to run in 2008 if “a perfect storm” of personal and political factors emerges in 2007. If making a run in 2008 is at all a possibility, no matter how remote, it makes sense to begin talking and making decisions about what you should be doing “below the radar” in 2006 to maximize your ability to get in front of this wave should it emerge and should you and your family decide it is worth riding.
It would be nine years after Pete first signed on to set up Obama’s Senate office—after a presidential campaign, a presidential transition office, an inauguration (Pete turned down his seat on the inaugural platform, preferring to watch Obama get sworn in on TV at home), a three-month stint pinch-hitting as Obama’s chief of staff when Rahm Emanuel left in 2010 (“I said right then, I’m not interested in chief of staff; frankly I don’t want the call at three A.M. about the earthquake in Honduras….”), another presidential campaign, another few years in the White House—before Pete was able to convince Obama that he really meant it, that his assistance was only on a temporary basis, and he was now going to stop, go home, and spend time with his cats.
* * *
—
“Pete said, ‘You know, making sure that we’ve got a good correspondence office that constituents feel that you are hearing them and that you are responding to them, that makes up for a lot of stuff,’ ” Obama told me, talking about those early days with Pete in his Senate office and about how something as mundane as the mail became a part of the conversation.
“And then during the course of maybe a year and a half of campaigning,” Obama said, “every once in a while people would write me a letter. Or they would slip a letter to me on the rope line. And some of them would just be amazing. And they would help shape the stories that I told during the campaign because they weren’t abstract.
“You know, this is a mom who’s trying to figure out, how do you go back to school and look after her kids at the same time and pay the bills? This is a dad who had lost his job and described how hard it was to feel like he was worth anything.
“And that would…orient me.”
* * *
—
When Pete talked to me about the origins of the mailroom operation, he was more blunt: “I hate writing letters to friends,” he said. “So if someone cares enough to sit down and write a letter, the elected official ought to pay attention to it. It’s often the only direct contact that an individual citizen has with his or her elected official. My view has always been that the quality of the communication says something about how the elected official views his or her role in terms of serving the public, regardless of party affiliation or political philosophy.”
It was just: Read your mail. It was basic. Like: Tie your shoes. Or perhaps: Say your prayers. It may have seemed painfully obvious. It may have been in Obama’s mind all along. But Pete articulated it, and he would continue to articulate it.
“I don’t want to overstate it,” Pete said. “I mean, I was probably more focused on finding bin Laden than answering an individual letter from Montana. So I’m not suggesting I’m different from anybody else in that regard. But I do think I made a conscious priority to find good people to work in the presidential office of correspondence, and that it was important, and that the president and senior people understood that it was important.”
After the inauguration in 2009, Obama’s transition team had arrived to find that the Bush administration had left virtually nothing in terms of guidance about how to set up an Office of Presidential Correspondence. No system in place for sorting mail, no procedure manuals, no templates, no software, no form letters you could simply spit out.
And then came the avalanche. A quarter of a million letters a week to the new president. Boxes of mail stacked to the ceiling and lining the hallways. The Obama team didn’t yet have stationery.
* * *
—
Mike Kelleher from Obama’s Senate office was the person who stepped up to tackle the mess.
Pete was surprised. He’d figured Mike would want a job like assistant secretary of commerce, something with the oomph and pizzazz befitting a guy of his pedigree. Mike had known Obama since 1999; they were rookies carving careers in politics together—Obama coming from his work as a community organizer and Mike from the Peace Corps. They ran and lost side-by-side campaigns for Congress together, and Mike went on to serve as director of economic development and outreach in Obama’s Senate office.
Now Mike said he wanted to do the mail. “It’s a challenge, it needs to be done, and I’m willing to do it.” He rolled up his sleeves. He carved out the OPC mission statement—“To listen to the American people, to understand their stories and concerns and respond on behalf of the president.” He came up with an organizational chart and started interviewing. Candidates would have to pass an elaborate screening process if they wanted to work in OPC. They would have to be willing to volunteer in the mailroom before getting hired; Mike wanted to see how they interacted with one another and with elderly and student volunteers. He looked for compassion. He told them how lucky they would be to be reading mail. They would get to know America better than anyone.
He built the staff, drew up a ten-page strategic plan for the mailroom, wrote algorithms for a mail coding system, set up a casework decision tree, assembled a library of policy-response letters, and developed quality-control manuals. He put in sixteen-hour days, weekends, creating order out of the chaos and assembling an army of empathic mail-reading soldiers, including Fiona.
When I reached out to Mike to ask him about all of this, about building OPC, he said, “I didn’t build it. I was there and I managed the people…really talented people….I made a couple good decisions in hiring people.”
And then he said, “Pete Rouse. Pete Rouse set the tone of what a public servant is for me.”
It kept going around like that—Mike crediting Pete, Pete crediting Mike, Pete crediting Obama, Obama crediting Pete.
Say what you will about the Obama administration, but this was not a braggy bunch.
* * *
—
Word came that President Obama wanted to see some of the mail just the day after he took office. Mike got the call from the Oval saying the president wanted to see five letters. Then they called back with a correction. The president wanted to see fifteen letters. They called back one more time. He wanted to see ten that day, and every day.
“By the time I got to the White House and somebody informed me that we were going to get forty thousand or whatever it was pieces of mail a day,” Obama told me, “I was trying to figure out, how do I in some way duplicate that experience I had during the campaign?
“Ten a day is what I figured I could do. It was a small gesture, I thought, at least to resist the bubble. It was a way for me to, every day, remember that what I was doing was not about me. It wasn’t about the Washington calculus. It wasn’t about the political scoreboard. It was about the people who were out there living their lives who were either looking for some help or angry about how I was screwing something up.
“And I, maybe, didn’t understand when I first started the practice how meaningful it would end up being to me.”
* * *
—
One side benefit of a president asking to read ten letters a day was that it sent a message that reverberated throughout the White House, from the lowest-ranking staffer working the scanners over in the EEOB to speechwriters, policy makers, and senior advisors in the West Wing: Mail was important. And if the mail was important, so were the people handling it. In the early days, Pete would head over to OPC himself, tell everybody in the mailroom how much he appreciated their contribution, tell them that it mattered to the president, that they mattered to the president.
“That stuff makes a difference,” Pete told me. “Just knowing that your contribu
tion had value and was valued.”
He gave me an example, motioned toward a framed photo by the window. It was among a cluster of other photos. It was a picture of him seated at a dinner, the rest of the people in the banquet hall up on their feet giving him a standing ovation and Obama at the lectern. Pete said it was a gift from Obama when Obama had finally given in and let him retire. Obama had thrown Pete a dinner and given him the picture, with a small message at the bottom.
“You can go over and look at that if you want,” Pete said.
Pete, there is a city full of people who owe their success to you. I’m one of them. Thank you, my friend.
“Stuff like that sticks with you,” Pete said. He sat up straight, his hands resting gently on his knees.
There was a guitar hanging on the wall near the photo, and it looked like Obama had signed that too. I asked Pete about it, and he got up to come over to admire it. He rocked from side to side as he walked as if to avoid one ache or another.
“A Fender,” he said. There was a Senate seal painted on the guitar, an Obama campaign seal, and the presidential seal. Pete said Obama had commissioned it. Another going-away present. “What’s it say on here? He wrote on it. It’s hard to read.”
We leaned toward the guitar, tilting our heads.
“Thanks for…” We couldn’t read what Obama had written on Pete’s guitar.
“So you’re a guitarist,” I said to Pete.
“No,” he said.
Not a guitarist. I paused to recap Pete’s résumé. He was not a lawyer, not a lobbyist, not an aspiring author, not a person who lobbied to become Senator Obama’s chief of staff, let alone President Obama’s chief of staff, and he was not a guitarist. (His job title at Perkins Coie was “senior policy advisor.”)
“I’m a Grateful Dead fan,” he said, and he smiled. His face was wide, puffy, and the smile lifted all the worry off it. “My two greatest professional accomplishments,” he said. “Number two is helping elect the first African American president; number one is reuniting the Grateful Dead.”
During the 2008 campaign, the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir had reached out to say he was an Obama supporter. He’d wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help.
“There’s one thing,” Pete said to Weir. The band had split up in 1995 after lead guitarist Jerry Garcia died; surviving members went on to tour in varying configurations, but never all of them together. “Maybe just one thing…”
And so it was that on February 4, 2008, a reunited Grateful Dead played before a sold-out crowd at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and then again in October, along with the Allman Brothers Band, before a sold-out crowd at the Bryce Jordan Center in University Park, Pennsylvania, and amid the crowd at both shows, there was Pete Rouse bopping his head to the beat.
“Greatest professional accomplishment,” Pete said again.
This reminded him of a related point: Writing thank-you notes to the Grateful Dead and to the Allman Brothers should not be difficult.
Pete expected Obama to gush in the thank-yous. This was the Grateful Dead. And this was the Allman Brothers.
When it came time to write them, Obama had been on a plane to Hawaii to see his grandmother, who was dying. “That’s a long trip,” Pete told me. He had sketched out some ideas for the thank-you notes and had sent them with Obama to do on the plane.
“I asked him, ‘Please handwrite each one.’ ” Pete had provided a list of all the band members and some suggested lines so that Obama could personalize each note.
Pete got a call from a staffer on the campaign plane. Obama wanted to know about these thank-you notes. Why couldn’t he just write one to the whole Grateful Dead and then one to the whole Allman Brothers Band? Wouldn’t that be sufficient?
“Tell him I’m going to quit if he does that,” Pete joked to the staffer.
As he relayed this story to me, he underscored the word “joked.” There was no way he would have ever quit on Obama. Pete wanted me to make sure that point was clear and could not be misinterpreted; he was getting antsy. He was not a person who did interviews. He was not good at anecdotes.
“To me it shows that he doesn’t have the same sensitivity to this that you or I would,” Pete told me. “Which is why he did relate to the mail.” Expressing heartfelt thanks to famous legends of rock and roll was one kind of communication (pretty basic), answering mail from random folks in Idaho or New Jersey quite another. “When he was responding to individual stories, as opposed to just thanking someone for doing something for him, it became very personal to him. Then he wanted to do it.”
We went back to the couch, and Pete winced as he sat. He said he had to fly to Chicago in the morning for a meeting, was considering canceling on account of his back. He looked at me, seemed to assess my reaction, as you do when you need a friend to give you permission to bail on something.
“Yeah, you should cancel,” I said. “Just walking through the airport—”
“For a two-hour lunch and a dinner,” he said. “You know?”
Oh, absolutely.
“Did the surgery help your brother?” he asked.
A hundred percent.
Somehow this led to news of my husband’s successful knee replacement.
“Oh, my knees,” he said.
July 23, 2012
Ms. Emily Nottingham
Tucson AZ
Dear President Obama,
When my son was killed in the Tucson mass murders last year, you asked if there was anything you could do. There is. I am asking you to support some reasonable steps to protect your citizens. Reinstating the ban on assault weapons and extended magazine clips should be a simple step to make our public places more safe for citizens. Our rights of assembly are threatened. I believe that you can be a vigorous supporter of the second amendment and still support modest regulation of weapons of mass murder. If you will not oppose the NRA, then seek out the support of the NRA in this gun safety measure. My son was killed in the mass murder in Tucson. Now it has happened again and more young people have been senselessly murdered by a stranger in a public place armed with weapons designed to kill many people very quickly. Enforcement of existing laws is not a sufficient response; additional steps are necessary to restrict easy access to weapons of mass murder. The Tucson shooter was not diagnosed as mentally ill when he legally purchased these super-lethal weapons; I would not be surprised if the Aurora shooter also had no such diagnosis. We need to look at the weapons themselves.
Please consider being a leader on this issue; others will follow behind you. Thank you for thinking seriously about this and seeking a resolution.
Emily Nottingham
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
Emily—
Thank you for your letter. I can only imagine the heartbreak you’ve gone through. I agree with you about common sense gun control measures, and although I confess that it is currently challenging to get Congress to take on the issue, I will do my best to help move public opinion.
Sincerely,
Barack Obama
Contact Us—Civil Rights
Submitted: May 9, 2012 16:16
From: Laura King Ph.D.
Address: Columbia MO
Topic: Civil Rights
I have no idea why you decided to endorse marriage equality today. But I wanted to say thank you, on behalf of myself, my partner, Lisa, and especially our 8 year old son, Sam. In the last few days, I think I had myself convinced that I would be fine if you played the political game and stayed silent on our family’s right to exist. I kept telling myself that I “knew” you supported us, even if it didn’t make political sense for you to say so. I am a strong supporter of you and your agenda and I had myself convinced that I wanted you to be re-elected more than I needed to hear you say you bel
ieve that my family deserves a place at the American table. It turns out I was wrong about that. After hearing about your interview today, I find myself sitting in my office crying and realizing that hearing those words from you means more to me than I ever imagined. I am overwhelmed—touched and surprised and just tremendously grateful that anyone in your position would put principle above politics, would just say the truth about what is right. I admire your courage and character and I am so glad that you are our President. I am proud of you.
My partner’s parents live in North Carolina and last night’s results were very hurtful to all of us—our son is their only grandchild—as if people could vote away our family. I spent the better part of this morning contemplating what it means to be a member of a tiny minority, so small and dispensable that it seems to be no problem for people to put my civil rights up for a popular vote.
I know from experience that change can only occur when courageous and compassionate straight people take action. To me, the stakes for you seemed impossibly high. I don’t know why you decided to take this stand. And I hope that it does not cost you dearly. And I will do all that I can to see that it doesn’t. And in the meantime, thank you so much, Mr. President.
To Obama Page 8
