To Obama: With Love, Joy, Hate And Despair

Product Description

Every day, President Obama received ten thousand letters from ordinary American citizens. Every night, he read ten of them before going to bed. This is the story of how they shaped his presidency. Together they reveal the diary of a nation. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter-writers themselves & the White House staff in the Office of Presidential Correspondence who were witness to the millions of pleas, rants, thank-yous & apologies that landed in the mailroom during the Obama years. There is Peggy, a patriotic grandmother who thinks the President is trying to lead the country into socialism & recommends that he read the Constitution; Bill, a lifelong Republican whose attitude towards immigration reform was transformed when he met a boy who escaped MS-13 gang leaders in El Salvador; Jordan, a seven-year-old about to be adopted, who wants to thank the President for keeping him safe; James, who on the morning after the 2016 election tells the President to start packing; & Dawn, who writes to say that he made it possible for a very jaded generation to begin to hope & believe in the good. They wrote to Obama out of gratitude & desperation, in their darkest times of need, with anger, fear & respect. To Obama is an intimate look at one man`s relationship with the American people, & at a time when empathy intersected with politics in the White House.