The Pain in the Butt at the White House

Among the loads of information that the White House sends daily to journalists on their “mailing list,” the latest piece is called “Daily Snapshot,” a daily snapshot of the activities of President Barack Obama.

The “Snapshot” this Wednesday in particular caught my attention because it showed a bit of what I defend as an essential position in the seat of a government (any government): the position of the person who is a “pain in the butt,” but who has enough freedom to tell those in power the things that the flatterers who surround them in industrial numbers prefer to omit.

At the White House, there isn’t exactly a person who is a pain in the butt, rather a system of correspondence that Obama himself has been obligated to read since he took over. Of the 65,000 letters that the White House receives, the hundreds of thousands of e-mails, thousands of faxes, and 2,500-3,000 daily telephone calls, the president reads and responds personally to 10.

Of course, since you are already taken by cynicism about politicians (all of them in the world), you will say that the selection of correspondence is sweetened for Obama so that he reads only the least objectionable.

Mike Kelleher, Director of the Office of Correspondence from the White House, says that it’s not like that. The letters selected “are the ones that best represent what is happening right now.”

Kelleher added that the president always says he does not want to live in a bubble. Rather, he feels a need for more than one boring person each day to tell him that the world outside the White House is not so rosy.

In the video, Obama himself is shown saying that some letters are heartbreaking. And he reads one of them, from a retired couple who narrates the problems with their health insurance, the man explaining that he was left unemployed and that their medical needs were “eating our retirement.”

It is clear that in Brazil, a letter with this type of story would be delicate, but in the U.S., the richest country in the world, it has another dimension.

Basically, the scheme adopted by the U.S. president allows, at least in theory, a break in the logic of an old and well-made propaganda, in which a subordinate tells the chief “nice shirt, Fernandinho.” Remember? Obama is reminded 10 times a day that his shirt as president is not always pretty.