Obama's letter-reading: 'Staying in touch'

by Mark Silva

Obama has mail.

He gets e-mail from the closest of friends on that BlackBerry which he fought to preserve inside the bubble of the protected presidency.

He also gets snail-mail, piles of it.

"Every weekday,'' reports Ken Walsh, a veteran White House correspondent and friend of ours, the president either sits at his desk in the Oval Office or settles into a comfortable chair in the residence and opens "a purple folder containing some very important material--10 letters from the outside world.''

The correspondence is selected by the president's staff, a mere sampling of the roughly 40,000 letters addressed to the president each day.

The president responds to one or two with handwritten notes, Walsh reports for U.S. News and World Report.

"Sometimes, the letters prompt him to inquire about a specific problem or to pass along an interesting idea or poignant story to his policymakers, advisers say.;;

The president gave adviser David Axelrod and other aides copies of a letter from an Arizona woman whose husband lost his job and suffered a pay cut at his next job, threatening the family's mortgage payments.

"It was a heart-wrenching story that illustrated the pain that Americans are enduring during the economic downturn,'' Walsh reports, quoting Obama as telling an aide: "We need to help folks like these.''

"The letter-reading ritual is designed to help Obama stay in touch,'' Walsh reports.

Read more of Walsh's report on Obama's letter-reading.