White House Correspondents’ Dinner: Obama References Kim Kardashian, Glee, Young Jeezy …

ObamaAt this weekend’s annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama stepped up to the podium and delivered a pretty entertaining 17 minutes of stand-up. He kicked things off with the classic “Wait, my mic was on?” gag, which slagged off both the cast of Glee and Kim Kardashian; later, he made self-deprecating jokes about how the presidency was affecting his physical appearance by insinuating he was slowly but surely morphing into Morgan Freeman. There were shots taken at Arianna Huffington’s controversial aggregation methods: When congratulating her site the Huffington Post on its recent Pulitzer win, Obama declared, “You deserve it, Arianna. There’s no one out there linking to the kind of hard-hitting journalism that HuffPo is linking to every single day. And you don’t pay them! That’s a great business model.” And there were shots taken at Mitt Romney, too, of course, with most of the focus going lightheartedly at that time Mitt strapped the family dog to the top of the car and took off on a road trip. (The joke was that Obama wanted to take away our dogs’ rights to ride on top of our respective vehicles, delivered via a fake campaign ad scored to that sad Sarah McLachlan song: “America’s dogs can’t afford four more years of Obama. For them, that’s 28 years.”) And I straight-up LOL’d when Obama shouted out Hillary Clinton’s Colombian beer-drinking adventure: “Four years ago I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Four years later, she won’t stop drunk-texting me from Cartagena.”

But the best part of the segment came toward the end, when Barack made predictions for his next term: “In my first term I sang Al Green. In my second term, I’m going with Young Jeezy. [Pause.] Michelle said, ‘Yeah.’ I sing that to her sometimes.’” Young Jeezy! Young Jeezy! Obama has repeatedly nodded to Jay-Z and Nas and some of the genre’s other elder statesmen, but to my knowledge this is the deepest dive into hip-hop that the Prez has attempted so far, and I gotta say, I’m impressed. Presumably Barack is referencing Jeezy’s “My President,” the 2008 jam on which Young, yes, declares his support for the then Democratic nominee — but also, as he always does, talks about selling vast amounts of cocaine. Jeezy seems pretty psyched about it, tweeting “Shout out to @BarackObama” and “You know they love the snowman in the white house. #Turntup.” So whatever else happens on the road to the general election, one thing now seems clear: Obama has the United Streets Dopeboyz of America vote locked up.

Filed Under: Glee, Kim Kardashian, Obama, Young Jeezy

Amos Barshad has written for New York Magazine, Spin, GQ, XXL, and the Arkansas Times. He is a staff writer for Grantland.

Archive @ AmosBarshad