For the White House, the “permanent campaign” is fighting to win every news cycle, and protecting information with a tight inner circle of in-the-know people. The Bush administration mastered the art of the permanent campaign—is Barack Obama following suit?

In a New York Times Magazine feature posted online Wednesday about future White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, lamented the end of the campaign. ”It’s never going to be the same,” he said. “I think everyone is wistful.”

Ah, the days when you could completely control the message. Obama was allegedly furious that details about his courtship of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state leaked out. He said he was hopeful, yet realistic, about what it would be like once his team was installed in the White House. “This is Washington,” he told the Times. “Or it will be Washington. So I’m sure it will not be perfect.”

A White House with no leaks? Impossible. And we’ve presumably learned there are drawbacks to a administration that is always in campaign mentality. Scott McClellan, Bush’s press secretary between 2003 and 2006, received praise from Bush for staying so consistently on-message. As related in the Times feature, Bush thanked McClellan for his work during the campaign. “I want to thank Scotty for saying—nothing,” the President said.

And yet McClellan eviscerated Bush in his tell-all book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, writing that running a permanent campaign with the goal of getting re-elected was especially bad. “And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising.”

There’s no question we’re getting ahead of ourselves—Obama hasn’t even been president for one day yet. And while Obama and his team might be wishing the campaign were still going on, they also aren’t the Bush administration. According to the Times article, Robert Gibbs will have walk-in privileges to Obama’s office, which will be right down the hall from his own. David Axelrod, one of Obama’s closest advisers, says the the atmosphere will be “collegial” and “not excessively hierarchical.”

President Bush attempted to keep the press at bay during his first term in office, holding the fewest number of press conferences (17) for any president in the television age. Obama had beaten the record for most post-election, pre-inauguration press conferences back in November.  At least in superficial access, Obama gets the nod.

Obama is also experimenting with how he communicates with his constituents—directly, and not through the press. He is posting his weekly addresses on YouTube, and there is a place on the Change.gov Web site for feedback from voters. Like any new media experiment, it’s not clear how well this one is working yet. The first Obama address received almost one million hits, but since then, the numbers have steadily decreased. Only 161,000 people want to watch the President-elect talk about his choice for Secretary of Housing last week.

When Obama selected conservative pastor and gay marriage opponent Rick Warren to participate in the inauguration, people turned to transition Web site, voicing their opposition on the one place they could—the discussion page about Obama’s plan for service. Thousands said Warren was a bad choice. Obama hasn’t changed his mind about Warren yet (he said at his press conference Thursday, “We’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable …) but the transition team did add a new discussion page Friday for “general issues.” Here’s one sample post:

I’m done. While I wouldn’t vote for a Republican, I will actively promote people to not vote for Obama in the future, unless an apology is released.

An explanation that all he is doing is bringing different opinions together is not OK. you don’t get it, you don’t have to fight for your right to see your partner in the hospital everyday.

Shame on you Obama. Shame on your people. We had such big hopes and look at what you did to us.

In 2012 we will not come out in support of you, not after what you have done.

At the very least, this experiment in direct communication with constituents will be a learning experience for Obama. If Obama thought the press could be bad, he doesn’t know the American people.