I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Tuesday, December 29th.

With me now is Gabe de Benedetti, New York Magazine National Correspondent. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much, Brian.

Gabe, your Biden article is called A Biden Style of Government is Emerging.

Lowest Drama possible.

Lowest drama in what sense?

Well, in the sense that, well, in many senses, actually, but the idea that I was talking

about here is how he's building his cabinet. There have been a lot of questions about, you know,

how he's coming up with some of these picks. Not many questions about the actual qualifications of

the people because they all are very qualified, but there were questions about, for example,

why Pete Buttigieg made sense as

transportation secretary, why Susan Rice, who is a foreign policy expert, made sense in a domestic

policy role. Why Javier Bacera, the California Attorney General, made sense for health and human

services. And what I was doing in the story was explaining through my reporting that the way that

he's making some of these selections is not necessarily just by trying to find the top experts

in every single field, though he certainly has done that in many cases, but really to choose

people that he trusts, that he knows well, that he knows he can work with because he views

the pandemic not as a series of parallel crises that each agency

can deal with one-on-one, but rather as an interlocking crisis.

And for that reason, he wants a team that he knows he can build together and, you know,

a team full of people that he trusts personally so that he doesn't think there's going to be

any sort of questions about how he's communicating

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