Posted on 09/29/2012 9:28:26 AM PDT by kristinn
It isn’t every day that you pick up the phone and the person on the other end says, “Air Force One. Please hold for the president.”
That’s what happened to Merion Station mom Sandy Swanson one dinnertime about three weeks ago, when she was rushing to get reach for Parents Night at her older daughter’s school, Merion Elementary.
And then the familiar voice came on the line.
President Barack Obama was personally responding to a letter Swanson sent in mid-August, when she decided she wanted to let him know about her family’s donation to his campaign and what it meant to her.
In the letter, she explained that the $15 she and husband Steve had sent was as much as they could contribute, now that he is back in school at Temple University, working on a graduate degree.
Maybe it was the frame of reference in which she put the contribution that struck a chord.
“Fifteen dollars is a special pizza dinner at our local pizza shop” – shout out here to Poppi’s Pizza in Wynnewood.
“It’s one-and-a-half tickets to see the newest film at the old-school cinema we walk our daughters to.
“It’s getting fresh fruit instead of frozen; fresh veg instead of canned.
“It’s tickets to the Franklin Institute in the heart of Philly. (We’ve never been.)
“It’s all these things to a family like ours.”
“It’s about this year’s campaign. It’s about wanting to say that $15 means something these days . . .” she writes elsewhere in the letter. “I will never be a ‘player’ (in the political sense), but I still want to believe I can play a part.”
SNIP
Obama supporters in 2008, the Swansons wanted to support the president’s re-election bid as best they could. “This is a different time around for us,” she said. “We’re hurting. So’s the whole world.”
And so she wrote and mailed the letter, e-mailing it also. A response came first from a campaign group in Chicago that goes through e-mail correspondence. Moved by its message, some interns there pooled resources and treated the family to that pizza dinner.
That is when she told them about her other effort. Swanson was already at work on plans for a neighborhood block party where she wanted to make information about the election and Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law available to those who were interested.
Her idea was, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we got together on the porch and talked with some friends.” Then it “got a little bigger.” She began planning it as a block party for her street and a couple of adjoining streets.
Swanson said she went door to door, told neighbors what she had in mind, got signatures so that she could go to Lower Merion Township and get approval to close a part of the street this Sunday afternoon, Sept.. 30. She is calling the party a “Barack-on-the-Block Party.” (Swanson has asked that the specific location not be listed, to keep it on a neighborhood scale.)
Word apparently went up the chain, and that is how her phone happened to ring that dinnertime.
SNIP
Isn’t “Lower Merian Township” where a school was issuing laptop computers with the cameras activated so they could record kids in their bedrooms doing bedroom-stuff?
Is she on the Foo Stam? Did he gib her a phow?
So you're sending money to the guy that's perpetuating unemployment and inflation? What a maroon.
And another thing: that money would have been MUCH better spent on an educational trip and a few happy memories.
Priorities...
She forgot to say that fifteen bucks could have paid for five lbs of burger or pay for gas thats up to 4 bucks a gallon. All thanks to President Obamas bad ideas.
This woman is obviously NOT very bright.
Maybe if she would use her brain, she’d have more than $15 to kick around. Why donate to someone whose policies and beliefs cause mass unemployment?
And another thing: that money would have been MUCH better spent on an educational trip and a few happy memories.
True. And The Franklin Institute also offers a Camp-In program for scouts. Many if not most of the Girl Scouts that my wife took on Camp-Ins there pursued science through college and graduate school.
http://www.fi.edu/Camp-In/badgeprogram.php
The Franklin Institute is a much better place to spend $15 than on someone who spends a record amount of time on the golf course, and swills $350 White House wine. Whatever her husband is getting his graduate degree in, I would be surprised if it was any kind of hard science. Or logic.
BTW, if Zero is a shoo-in for Pennsylvania, why all the attention from both his campaign and Romney's?
Wow. If I wrote a letter. I’d probably get a vist (most likely from the SS)
“...husband Steve had sent was as much as they could contribute, now that he is back in school at Temple University, working on a graduate degree.”
A degree in what, I wonder? Anything useful to get a productive job, or something touchy feely that has no value outside of academia or the HR department ?
Oh for crying out loud....this retard of a “reporter” is covering a friggin’ campaign email as though it were spontaneous news.
Cheryl: there’s nothing romantic about this...the letter was determined to appeal to Obama’s base and the call was a marketing ploy to increase its value as a fund-raising tool.
Indeed it was [Wiki]:
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