Away from his Washington bully pulpit, on the trail and on late-night television, from singing the classics to slow jamming the news, President Obama’s ease as a campaigner — as opposed to his likely Republican rival — is once again emerging. Here are a few scenes from Obama’s pop-culture push.
It starts at a fundraiser at the Apollo theater in January. Obama surprised the crowd by singing a few bars of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Unbeknownst to many, it turned out the president has a pretty decent voice.
Boasting slightly, Obama said in a Rolling Stone interview: “I can sing. I wasn’t worried about being able to hit those notes.” The fundraiser was Obama’s fifth event that day, and he was feeling a bit bored of talking policy, so he broke out into song. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney gave the OK to do it on stage, “so I went up there and we did it,” Obama said.
Do we smell a trend? Obviously Obama thought it went well, because several weeks later, during a concert at the White House, he got up on stage and sang a bit of “Sweet Home Chicago” with B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Mick Jagger. Obama told Rolling Stone that, after the Apollo, he was actually trying to avoid singing at that White House concert. “The only problem with my Apollo performance is that everywhere I go now, somebody wants me to sing. My whole point is that the fewer the performances, the higher the ticket price, so you don’t want to overdo it.”
Okay, enough singing for now. Obama has also embraced emerging social networking services, including Instagram, the social picture-sharing service recently purchased by Facebook for a whopping $1 billion. The app is most commonly used to share photos with funky filters. And during Tuesday’s speech on student loan rates, Obama urged audience members to use the Twitter hashtag #dontdoublemyrate as a channel discuss his push to prevent student loan rates from doubling.
Later on Tuesday — on Late Night, in fact — Obama joined Jimmy Fallon on stage to “slow jam the news.” Obama stuck to his student message during the slow jamming, but The Roots band can take any mundane melody and make it sing.
Watch Obama jam:
