wapo

The letters that make Obama long for his community-organizing days

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He said his nightly reading in the White House sometimes made him pine for his days as a community organizer back in the 1980s, when he was making $10,000 a year and working on the South Side of Chicago. He had just graduated from college, and he bought a used car for $2,000 and spent his days driving around to the city’s housing projects to speak with residents about their lives. He became familiar with many of the same issues that would flood his mail 25 years later: housing calamities, chronic unemployment and struggling schools.

Obama’s fellow organizers in Chicago considered him a master of hands-on, granular problem-solving. He was skinny and boyish, a good listener, if still a bit naive; and some of the older women in the housing projects made a habit of inviting him into their homes and cooking for him. He looked around their apartments, keeping a log of maintenance issues, and then delivered that list to the landlords. He helped arrange meetings with city housing officials to talk about asbestos problems. He established a tenants rights organization, founded a job-training program and led a tutoring group that prepared students for college.

When he left for Harvard Law School after three years in Chicago, Obama knew he wanted to become a politician, a job that would allow him to listen to people’s problems and enjoy the simple satisfaction of solving them.

Now he was the most powerful politician of all — but fixing problems seemed more difficult and satisfaction more elusive. He had yet to make progress on key campaign promises to reform education and immigration. Just this past week, his jobs bill failed to move forward in the Senate. When we spoke, Obama didn’t blame the gridlock and partisanship of a divided capital.... [more]