Obama's Book Club

An NPR story called Obama: A New Force in Publishing describes how our president is helping authors sell books.

When he’s seen reading a book on a plane or carrying one in his hand during his travels, it can create a stir. When Obama was photographed holding Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, the book’s sales bumped immediately, and requests for media interviews with the author surged.

Now, that’s the sort of surge I’d love to experience! So here’s my plan: I’m going to send a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to the schools the Obama kids go to. Both Obama daughters attend Sidwell Friends School, but Sidwell’s lower school is in Bethesda, Maryland — that’s where Sasha attends second grade. Malia is in fifth grade, and that’s part of the middle school, located on the same campus as the high school in Northwest Washington.

I’ll send a letter along with each book, explaining the visits Hanni and I make to schools. I’ll tell them about our dear friends in Alexandria, Virginia. “We visit Pick and Hank a lot,” I’ll write.” Next time we’re in town, Hanni and I would love to come visit your students.” I suppose the Sidwell Friends School gets barraged with offers like this, but am hoping my letter might stand out:

• I live in Chicago, and that’s where the Obama girls are from.
• it’s rumored Melee and Sasha will be getting their new dog as an Easter present tomorrow, so dogs will be all the rage at the school.
• Because I can’t see, I won’t know which of the kids in the school are the Obamas. This means I won’t gawk.

I came up with this great idea (to send a book to Sidwell) months ago, when the Obamas first announced that the girls would be attending that school. But as Thomas Edison liked to say, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” So far I haven’t worked up one bead of sweat composing the letter, much less addressing the envelopes or asking Hanni to guide me to the post office to slide the packets into the mail. Now that I’ve put this idea out to the public in this blog post, though, I have to do it, right?

My fantasy, of course, is that Sidwell asks Hanni & me to come. Malia and Sasha love our presentation so much that they take Safe & Sound home from the school library. Their dad greets them on the White House lawn when they return from school, and they hand the book over to him before receiving their hugs. Snap! Snap! Snap! The cameras start clicking, and next thing you know President Obama is pictured hugging his girls with one arm, the other arm hugging a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound. This could be bigger than…well…bigger than Oprah.

From the NPR story:

Perhaps, Seroy (Jeff Seroy, a publicist for the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux} likes to say — only half in jest — Obama will have the kind of influence on book sales that his supporter Oprah Winfrey has had.

“I think there’s room for two Oprahs, and I think if there is a new Oprah, Oprah will be happy that Obama is the new Oprah,”