A look at hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, and what they reveal about the president’s decision-making process:

One Cabinet official made it clear that she did not share the President’s growing commitment to coupon-clipping: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She rejected the White House’s budget for her department, and wrote the President a six-page letter detailing her complaints. Some in the White House saw the long letter as a weapon, something that could be leaked if Clinton didn’t get her way. ‘At the proposed funding levels,’ Clinton wrote, ‘we will not have the capacity to deliver either the full level of civilian staffing or the foreign assistance programs that underlie the civilian-military strategy you outlined for Afghanistan; nor the transition from U.S. Military to civilian programming in Iraq; nor the expanded assistance that is central to our Pakistan strategy.’

“The Obama Memos.” — Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

More Lizza: “Inside the Crisis.” New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009