by Kenneth T. Walsh

president likes to reach out to "real people" across the country

President Obama visited Prague last week to sign a new agreement with Russia reducing nuclear warheads. But White House aides said the trip had advantages beyond finalizing the historic arms-control pact. It gave Obama a change of pace and freed him from the hyper-partisanship in Washington, at least for a while. And that's more important than ever for a president who was unusually critical of the capital in his campaign and who increasingly realizes that it's vital for him to escape from the Washington "bubble."

Actually, Obama intends to get out of town more than ever in the coming months, mostly on domestic trips, his aides say. Like so many of his predecessors, he is adopting the rhetoric of the Washington outsider. He has begun regularly mocking the excesses of the capital, its penchant for pettiness, and its hyper-partisanship, and he is emphasizing his need to get away. It's become a mantra that laces many of his speeches and his private comments, aides say.

In recent weeks, Obama has appeared at places as varied as Iowa City, Iowa, Boston, Charlotte, N.C., and Portland, Maine. And he rarely misses a chance to say how much he loves to visit with "real people" and not the regular crowd of Washington insiders that he associates with, including many of his own advisers. "The back and forth of what happens in this town grinds you slowly down," says White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "There's kind of a cooped-up nature to this facility that I think gets everybody that lives here a little stir crazy. So it's refreshing to finally get out in the real world." Obama prizes the many perks of living in the White House and he values the counsel of his advisers, Gibbs adds, but he is always eager to "get to meet and see and talk to real people." Obama accomplishes this in a variety of ways, Gibbs says, including town-hall meetings, taking questions from the audience after his speeches, holding private sessions with everyday citizens, and reading letters from a wide swath of Americans.

Other presidents have experienced the same need to escape from the capital. Ronald Reagan spent a total of a year of his eight-year presidency at his Santa Barbara ranch, where he replicated the outdoor lifestyle of a 19th-century Western landman, far from the duties and artificial protocols of the West Wing. Bill Clinton, like Reagan, talked about the need to tap into public concerns outside the beltway, and he held many events outside Washington. George W. Bush escaped frequently to his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He said it cleared his mind, gave him a respite from Washington's echo chamber, and enabled him to bring fresh thinking to the nation's problems.

Obama's correspondence is especially important to him. His staff selects 10 letters a day from the tens of thousands he receives for him to peruse, with an eye to illustrating the concerns of everyday people. He has read these batches of letters since his first week in office. "There are very few times that we discuss issues in meetings where he doesn't bring up something that he's read in the letters he's received," says a senior White House official. Obama will often read a letter that crystallizes a problem and pass it on to his staff, asking, "How do we fix this problem?"

Adds White House counselor David Axelrod: "That is something that he takes very seriously. You know, being by necessity cloistered in this building as much as he is and inside 'the bubble,' those letters are in many ways a lifeline to the American people, and so he reads them not just to have correspondence but also to get a real sense of what's happening. He also gets statistics on what the topics are that people are writing in on." Axelrod says the letters provide "a pretty fair reflection of what's going on out there."

Obama believes that "nothing punctuates a problem like the plight of an average American," says another senior White House official. This proved true when Obama read a letter from Natoma Canfield, a cancer victim whose health insurance premiums went up 40 percent because of her condition. Obama made her the centerpiece of a speech he made in Ohio recently. After the speech Obama faced criticism from some who said that Canfield may qualify for some type of insurance or assistance.

All this may seem a bit odd, since a president is by definition the leader of the Establishment, in charge of the government and setting much of the tone for official Washington. But presidents need a connection to the larger world beyond the beltway, and, as with Obama, they devise many ways to get it.

 

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Obama Aims to Escape Washington Bubble | Kenneth T. Walsh

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