As President Obama nears his 200th day in office, there’s one major thing we’ve learned about this White House: Increasingly, they don’t need the press. Case in point: Last night, administration officials posted a short video looking at the process by which Obama gets his mail. According to the White House, the president reads 10 letters from average people every day—correspondence culled from the literally tens of thousands of pieces of mail sent to Obama each week. This is not exactly breaking news. We’ve known about Obama and his letters for months—plenty of people have written about it and NBC included brief footage of the letters in its documentary on the Obama White House that aired in June. But the White House video goes significantly more in depth—showing the mail room where letters are sorted by topic and the staffers going through them to pick which ones will make it to the president’s desk. And then you have Obama himself reading the letters aloud and talking about the ones he’s read this week--most of them, he tells the camera, are about health care. (What a coincidence!) It looks and sounds like a news story, no doubt to the chagrin of TV reporters at the White House. The only real give-away, besides the fact you never actually see or hear the interviewer, is a little logo identifying it as a WhiteHouse.gov video.

The goal here isn’t much different than what administration officials envisioned when they set up the White House Flickr account. As your Gaggler has written before, by opening up Obama’s world to the public in ways no other president has done before, they are giving a sense that the curtain has been raised, that the bubble has been punctured. They want to show that Obama, although he may be the leader of the free world, is a human being, just like you and me. People tend to support people they like, and Obama doesn’t want to repeat George W. Bush’s mistake of being too walled off and out of touch. But there’s a dueling component here in posting all these photos and videos: By doing it themselves, the White House controls the images and the story. They are bypassing the media filter to get out to the public exactly the points they desire to make, without the messiness of perhaps an unexpected question or an unflattering image. In some ways, they aren’t busting the presidential bubble but increasing it.

Over seven months after Barack Obama took the oath of office, the long-awaited campaign book from Washington Post political writer Dan Balz and Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson hits bookstores tomorrow. We were lucky enough to get an advance copy of The Battle for America 2008, and sent Gaggle-pal Stuart Johnson out to read it and report back on the juicy bits. The Washington Post has been excerpting the book over the last few days, but if you don’t have time to wade through all that, here’s Johnson’s take on it, and a few spoilers.