Amid all the strife of the 2016 presidential campaign, a Perry fifth grader reached out for advice to one of her elders, a man who is busy with many responsibilities but who nevertheless took the time to answer a 10-year-old’s questions.
The girl with the questions was Sophia McDevitt, 10 — “Actually, I’m 10-and-a-half” — a fifth grader at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Perry, and the man with the answers, or at least some of them, was U.S. President Barack Obama, who answered Sophia’s October letter with one of his own in November.
Sophia’s mother, AnneMarie McDevitt of Perry, explained how the surprising exchange with the White House came about.
“My little political activist, Sophia, unbeknownst to me, wrote a letter a couple months ago to President Obama,” McDevitt said. “This letter and ‘stuff’ arrived in the mail in response. I didn’t see the letter she wrote, and she doesn’t want to share it with me, but she assured me she spelled everything correctly.”
The “stuff” included pictures of the president with his family, including their two dogs, and other information about nutrition, the presidency and art in the White House.
Sophia said she wrote the letter to President Obama after watching the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
“After I watched the first debate,” she said, “I had some questions, and I wanted to know what President Obama thought about the debate and what was his perspective, so I wrote him and asked what he thought and who he would recommend for president.”
Her questions had to do with fairness and equal opportunity.
“I asked him what he thought when Hillary Clinton said that everybody deserved fairness and stuff and then when her and Donald Trump were arguing, and I thought maybe I should just write him a letter. And I said in my letter, ‘Do you believe that everybody deserves the same opportunities as everybody else?’ And he answered back that he agreed that everybody deserves the same respect and opportunities as everybody else does.”
President Obama wrote to Sophia: “Our country is a home to people of every background and belief. But while we might look different or come from different families, as Americans, we are united in our belief that all of us deserve the same rights and the same opportunities. We share a lasting responsibility to show each other kindness and respect, and to treat each other the way we want to be treated.”
Sophia has a 10-year-old’s grasp of some of the issues raised in the campaign by Trump.
“Some of my friends are Hispanic,” she said, “and they said that they’re worried and their parents are worried that they’re going to go back to Mexico, and sometimes I have to calm them down and tell them if they’re documented, they won’t have to go.”
As Trump said in the first debate, in language well suited to 10-year-olds, “We have to bring back law and order. We have gangs roaming the street. And in many cases, they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns. And they shoot people. And we have to be very strong. And we have to be very vigilant.”
To Trump’s law-and-order line, Clinton offered a nuanced answer in the first debate:
“Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses,” Clinton said. “And it’s just a fact that if you’re a young African-American man and you do the same thing as a young white man, you are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated. So we’ve got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system. We cannot just say law and order. We have to say — we have to come forward with a plan that is going to divert people from the criminal justice system, deal with mandatory minimum sentences, which have put too many people away for too long for doing too little.”
Clinton continued, “Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal justice system. We’ve just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte.”
In Tulsa, Okla., Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot by police Sept. 16. Crutcher was unarmed during the encounter, in which he was standing near his vehicle in the middle of a street. Videotape of the murder went viral.
In Charlotte, N.C., Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot Sept. 20 by police while he was waiting to pick up his son at a school bus stop.
Sophia seems to have great respect for President Obama and not only because he sent her free stuff, but not everyone has respect for America’s first black president.
As Clinton noted in the first debate, Trump “really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen. There was absolutely no evidence for it, but he persisted. He persisted year after year because some of his supporters, people that he was trying to bring into his fold, apparently believed it or wanted to believe it.”
“I think I did a great job,” Trump replied, “and a great service not only for the country, but even for the president, in getting him to produce his birth certificate.”
A CNN/ORC poll showed 20 percent of Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim who was born outside the U.S. The number jumps to 66 percent among Trump supporters.
Ten-and-a-half-year-old shoulders are not made to bear the weight of this sad time, but Sophia said she especially liked it when the president wrote, “By working together, I know we can make sure America is a place where each of us, no matter where we come from or what we look like, is free to live and love as we see fit.”
Sophia seemed to be leaning toward endorsing Hillary, who lost the Nov. 8 general election.
“If I had to choose,” she said, “I think I would agree with Hillary Clinton more than I would agree with Donald Trump because I just like her perspective better, and I like the way she talks about women and about how she planned to create more equality throughout America for women.”
Sophia said she would like someday to be president, “but I think there’s about 17 million other kids that are saying that at the exact same time. I don’t think being president would be that bad.”
“She’s hoping that another woman gets to do it before her,” AnneMarie said.
Both mother and daughter are tickled with the letter and other good things from the Oval Office and plan to have them framed. Sophia has been showing her letter around.
“I’ve shown it around to a lot of people,” she said, “but I think actually my grandpa has shown it to more people than actually I have. I think he’s even more excited than I am.”
Sophia is the granddaughter of Dan and Sally Spellman of Perry.
“All I can say is that this made her day and made her feel like her voice was heard and mattered in all this craziness,” AnneMarie said. “So, thank you to whoever at the White House put this together.”
