Video Offers Glimpse Inside Obama's Cabinet

By Kevin Robinson in News on Dec 15, 2009 4:20PM

The White House posted a video over the weekend, giving the world a unique behind-the-scenes look at how the President manages his Cabinet. Cabinet Secretary Chris Lu explains: "We try to do a cabinet meeting every two months. The meetings run about an hour and a half." And President Obama expresses his kudos to the team he's assembled "a lot of them are doing such a good job that they don't meet with me much because they're like the good students in class. They are just handling their business really well." And while this administration has done a great deal to reach out to the world using the digital technology that's available, as Ben Smith at Politico pointed out, "the absence of Obama's tech-savvy press aides from Twitter, for instance, have left the White House silent in one of each day's important streams of political conversation; staff is restricted to lurking. Instant messaging has gone from the place where (for reporters) campaigns dueled on a minute-to-minute basis to a form where the White House is, for fear of creating embarrassing records, silent. And top national security aides, in particular, spend much of the day in secure spaces where Blackberries are banned." Whether that's a handicap for the White House or just good policy will not doubt be debated for decades to come.