From The White House website, here is a slideshow of President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East and Europe. If you take the time to look at the photos, you’ll see both public and behind-the-scenes moments. You’ll see the President of the United States out in the world with the sun on his face, looking calm and confident. It makes such a change from watching GWB carry his fear around him like a toxic cloud.
I think White House Chief Photographer Pete Souza and his staff are doing an amazing job. I enjoy visiting the White House photostream sometimes. I enjoy the idea that I have a window — even a controlled one — through which I may see glimpses of the people of my government doing their jobs.
I am happy that the administration is doing so much to be transparent, and to provide as much of this kind of access as possible. If you haven’t visited the White House website and blog, I encourage you to check them out. Great resources. The government is busy: and even if you don’t like everything (or anything) they are doing, when did you ever before have a nearly-real-time clue about the process, the input, the decisions and the people responsible?
I’m thinking about writing a letter to the President. Not about what he should do with health care or federal marriage rights for everyone or the environment (although I certainly have opinions) — but rather to tell him what being American feels like for me right now, and what my hopes are for my country and the people who live here, and all the people who are affected by what we do (which is pretty much everyone in some way, no?). I have never been moved to communicate with a President in this particular way — as if he were an actual human being with whom I feel much in common: someone who is as smart as me, as committed as I am to being the best people we can, who takes as much joy from parts of his life as I do from mine and would like other people to have that experience too.
I don’t know — it sounds arrogant, put like that, as if my standards for myself are somehow relevant to the political leadership of a world superpower. People don’t have to be like me in order to run a country well: there are a zillion reasons why I’d be a crap president. And yet, it’s extraordinary for me to believe that the person in that role might actually have some of the same standards for himself that I do. It makes him real to me in a way that no politician has ever been for me; and it makes the politics more real, too.
The Obama administration is working overtime to humanize themselves to us and the rest of the world. Imagine if politics could become a human thing again. Imagine what we could all do.