White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Sorry I’m not the President, but Can I Help?

June 18, 2013 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

The calls come in all day and night. They come from all over the country, and from all kinds of people, and they've all dialed the wrong number. They think they've dialed the White House; instead they've dialed the office of “White House Chronicle,” a television program produced in Washington.
 
I've answered some of those calls, and they've given me an idea of public thinking.
 
Some callers, of course, are not in their right mind. They are usually the dead-of-night callers, oblivious to times of day and zones, who say they need to speak with the president urgently.
 
A recent caller from North Dakota, left a discombobulated voicemail message about her uncle, the gunning down of members of her family, and her “real need”to get in touch with the FBI. She was a caller with a soft voice and a real need for mental health care.
 
Then there are the daytime callers, mostly concerned citizens, who want to give President Obama a piece of their mind. I give many of them the White House switchboard and comment line numbers.
 
In mid-April, I spoke with a woman from Southern California who was mad as hell that the Senate had rejected a bipartisan plan to expand background checks for gun buyers, crippling the president's campaign to curb gun violence after the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
 
“The president needs to know about what my friend, a mother who lost her child in a shooting, is doing to stop gun violence in California. She is a really remarkable woman,” she told me.
 
Last week, I answered a call from David in New Orleans. He said, quite certainly, “I've finally reached you.” When I tried to tell him he hadn't reached the White House, he said, “Can I just ask you something?” I replied, “Sure.”
 
He said he was a former inmate and while he was incarcerated, he wrote lots of letters to the president. “But he never answered any of them. How long do I have to wait to get an answer? All I want is a pardon.” I told him that the White House gets thousands of letters a day, and he might have quite a wait. But I didn't want to tell him that “Obama has the stingiest pardon record of any modern president,” which San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders wrote on May 21.
 
This week, I hung up on a screamer for the first time. An agitated man from Brainerd, Minn., called about his school-skipping,19-year-old daughter.
 
“I'm not her guardian,” he said. “She lives with her mother, but her mother doesn't care if she goes to school. I say she has to go to school. What do you think?” I said I thought it's a family matter.
 
Then he started screaming, “So you're the White House, and you don't care about education! You don't care about my daughter! Do I have to go to the Supreme Court now?”
 
I cut him off. I didn't know whether he was a crazy or a concerned parent at the end of his tether, like a lot of parents these days.
 
Here's what I think: Citizens both on and off their rockers should exercise their free-speech rights. But please call the White House switchboard operators — described by the late chief switchboard operator Mary Crowe Burns, who answered the phones for seven presidents, as "part diplomat, part psychologist and part security guard” — at 202-456-1414. Operators are standing by.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: gun control, prisoner pardons, White House, White House telephone number

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Many Newspapers Are on Death Row; Will They Be Reprieved?

Many Newspapers Are on Death Row; Will They Be Reprieved?

Llewellyn King

Newspapers are on death row. The once great provincial newspapers of this country, indeed of many countries, often look like pamphlets. Others have already been executed by the market. The cause is simple enough: Disrupting technology in the form of the internet has lured away most of their advertising revenue. To make up the shortfall, […]

Fighting Wildfire With Fire, Lessons From Georgia and Florida

Fighting Wildfire With Fire, Lessons From Georgia and Florida

Llewellyn King

Did the fire at the end of Walt Disney’s iconic animated movie “Bambi” prejudice the country against forest management with controlled burning? Maybe so. The U.S. Energy Association in February presented a virtual media briefing on the fire threat in the West and the Southwest this year. The prognosis, especially from the weather forecasting company […]

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Dark Clouds on the Horizon for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Llewellyn King

The move to renewable energy sources and electrified transportation constitutes a megatrend, a global seismic shift in energy production, storage and consumption. But there are dark clouds forming, clouds reminiscent of another time. The United States has handed over the supply chain for this future to offshore suppliers of the critical materials used in the […]

The Threat of Nuclear War and the License It Has Given Putin

The Threat of Nuclear War and the License It Has Given Putin

Llewellyn King

History isn’t short of people to blame. You could say of the present world crisis that it was former president Barack Obama’s fault for not getting tougher with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Syria. You could blame former president Donald Trump for giving Putin a sense of entitlement and for undermining NATO, seeing it as […]

Copyright © 2022 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in