Barack Obama the Comforter-in-Chief.

Courtesy of the Washington Post:

It had become one of President Obama’s signature routines in the White House, a habit he mentioned in dozens of meetings and hundreds of speeches: Every night just before bed, he read 10 letters pulled from the 20,000 that Americans sent to him each day. The notes reminded him of why he wanted to be president, he liked to say. He called them his most intimate link to the people he governed. 

Most sobering of all for Obama, his self-described “direct connection” to Americans had also awoken him to a growing disconnect. People wrote because their problems demanded immediate attention, and yet the process of governing the nation was so slow that Obama sometimes felt powerless to help them. 

A few times during his presidency, Obama admitted, he had written a personal check or made a phone call on the writer’s behalf, believing that it was his only way to ensure a fast result. “It’s not something I should advertise, but it has happened,” he told me. Many other times, he had forwarded letters to government agencies or Cabinet secretaries after attaching a standard, handwritten note that read: “Can you please take care of this?” 

“Some of these letters you read and you say, ‘Gosh, I really want to help this person, and I may not have the tools to help them right now,’ ” the president said. “And then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person that wrote describing their story, there might be another hundred thousand going through the same thing. So there are times when I’m reading the letters and I feel pained that I can’t do more, faster, to make a difference in their lives.” 

And just in case you think this a ploy to make the President appear more compassionate than he truly is, reporter Eli Saslow goes on to add this:

Months after these people wrote to the president, when I mentioned their letters to Obama, he remembered the details of their lives. Their letters had shaped his speeches and informed his policies, but it was their personal stories that stuck with him. “Reading these letters can be heartbreaking,” he said. “Just heartbreaking.”

It is almost impossible to imagine any of the current Presidential candidates in the Republican party  taking the time to respond to Americans personally if they had the job, or EVER sending somebody a personal check to help them out in a time of crisis.

I have recently been hearing this criticism of the President that he does not connect in a personal way with the people, but I think that is a media contrivance and it is certainly not something that I have perceived from interviews or from pictures like these:

I believe that the President is a very decent, caring man, who very much wants to do the absolute best job that he can for this country.  And I further believe that it is that very decency which the Republicans perceive as a weakness and just one of the reasons they want to take his job away from him.

Personally I would much rather have a President who cares too much, than a President who cares too little. How many prisoners in Texas have been put to death while Rick Perry has served as its Governor again?