In all the hustle of the United Nations and G20 coverage last week, I failed to call your attention to this tidbit.

While at U.N .headquarters, President Obama paid tribute to the blue helmeted U.N. peacekeepers with a wreath and a meeting with top donors of peacekeeping troops. All well and good–and as it should be with 113,000 peacekeepers putting their lives on the line everyday.

But this isn’t what caught my attention (nor Charlie’s).

We were intrigued by the White House blog post about the event. More specifically, the author of the post was both appropriate and unusual.

Few know more about genocide, and efforts to prevent genocide, worldwide than Samantha Power, author of Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. In those books, Power raised many questions and critiques of both U.S. policy and U.N. operations.

But today, Power is a senior director on the National Security Council, a perch which usually allows for only limited appearances and few publications. Yet here she is on an official blog giving us the inside scoop on a meeting of the president with other heads of state.

To me, this looks like a great example of the transparency and accessibility we hoped for with this Administration. Let’s hope we see even more of it.

Related posts

• Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks
• The Transition
• The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power
• Obama: Liberal Interventionist or Progressive Realist?
• A Foreign Policy Back Channel? Unlikely