Obama "White House shrouded in bubble wrap"

By GottaLaff

I do appreciate the White House visitor log info, such as it is, and the .gov web sites. But now I'm curious. I'd love to know more about what it is we would love to know but don't:

Walter Shapiro: "For all the campaign talk of transparency, the Obama White House is, at best, translucent and often opaque. An unheralded but politically significant accomplishment is Obama's success in imposing Republican-style loose-lips-sink-ships discipline on normally garrulous Democrats. Sure there have been press leaks... But for the most part, Obama is either presiding over the most boring White House in human history or else he has been adroit in keeping internal doubts and divisions out of the headlines."

"Nothing will remain hidden forever -- if the publishing industry has anything to say about it... For the moment, though, this is still a White House shrouded in bubble wrap. Even though Obama dominates the TV screens and news headlines, there are surprising gaps in our knowledge of his 11-month presidency."

So what are we missing?

If you're not already familiar with him, here's a little background on Walter Shapiro:

Shapiro served in the Carter administration as a presidential speechwriter (1979) and as press secretary (1977-78) to Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall. In 1972, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Shapiro sought the Democratic nomination for a U.S. House seat and finished second in a six-way primary. Since 1979, his only partisan activity has been voting.