With Every Tweet and Flickr Photo, White House Shows Us Their Human Side

Originally published at Mediaite.

In case you missed it yesterday, the White House released a new album of Flickr photos of the last year in health reform that has been burning up the internet.  My Twitter feed today has been filled with people ooh-ing and aah-ing over the photos.

White House photographer Pete Souza captures a glimpse of behind-closed-doors moments at the White House from this past week and the past year as the White House worked to pass the health care bill — and they are, well, heartwarming. We see Hillary Clinton hugging President Obama; White House staffers cheering, applauding, and hugging as they watched Congress vote on the bill late Sunday night; Obama fist-bumping a young doctor who grins ear-to-ear; Nancy Pelosi holding her grandson and grinning next to Obama a day before the historic House vote.

Flickr is not a new tool; people have been using it to share their important moments with friends and family for years. But the Obama White House is the first White House to use Flickr to share their photos and are publicly documenting private moments that, until now, had remained hidden from the American people.

On another note, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also recently got on Twitter and though he started off slow, he has adjusted to the medium pretty quickly. This morning he cracked jokes with the rest of the Twitterverse, telling his followers that this video of a misguided White House staffer who bears a resemblance to Gibbs was most definitely not him. And then, perhaps most notably, after the historic bill-signing ceremony today, Gibbs responded to Vice President Biden’s earlier f-bomb in his excitement over the health care bill with a tweet remarking “Yes, Mr. Vice President, you’re right…”

Read the rest here.