Somebody calling herself “Obama Girl” is generating quite a buzz with her “Crush on Obama” video.
This immediately brought to mind the so-called racist ads run against Harold Ford in the closing days of the 2006 campaign. So far, though, most of the reaction I’ve seen has expressed either bemusement or admiration.
Obama Girl is keeping track of the press coverage on “her” blog and reports that someone has started a Facebook group for her.
Taegan Goddard (Political Wire): “the song and video took the Obama campaign by surprise and further demonstrated how the democratic nature of the Internet specifically Internet video on sites such as YouTube is affecting politics in unpredictable ways.”
PJM in Barcelona (PajamasMedia): “Move Over Monica, It’s Obama Girl.”
William Beutler (Blog PI): “It’s grade-A YouTube cheesecake for sure, but also helps that the R&B parody lyrics effectively deploy its political references, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that they also have that so-bad-it’s-good quality.”
David All (TechPrez): “Totally. Undeniably. Awesome.”
AllahPundit (Hot Air): “It’s obviously a goof; the question is whether it’s a goof from the left or the right.”
Tom Elia (The New Editor): “This is a pretty funny video … and it’s also an apt illustration of a lot of the hype surrounding Sen. Barack Obama.”
SeeDubya (JunkYardBlog) sees similarities between the video and news reporting on Obama.
Kate Phillips of the NYT is a little more skeptical, noting the sexual innuendo, calls it “steamy” and notes that it’s no surprise that it’s going viral: “if you watch the video, you’ll understand. It not only has her doing pole-dancing on the subway (clothed, mind you), but mashing up her bikini-clad bod next to those pix of Senator Barack Obama shirtless in his trunks from his Hawaii vacation last year.”
ABC’s Jack Tapper has already uncovered some details.
The song was performed by Leah Kauffman, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Temple University in Philadelphia, who wrote the lyrics with a friend, 32-year-old advertising executive Ben Relles, and the music with her producer, Rick Friedrich. An actress/model named Amber Lee Ettinger then lip-synched the song for the video, shot by filmmakers found on Craigslist two hours before Relles and Ettinger hit New York City one Friday in May to shoot the video on a DV camera.
“Not including the hours we spent working on it, it probably cost a couple thousand dollars,” said Relles, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, who said he did it for fun, not money, but is also selling “Obamagirl” and “I Got a Crush on Obama” T-shirts.
Relles said the idea for “I Got a Crush on Obama” came after he and Kauffman received some media notice for a previous collaboration that was a female take on a recent “Saturday Night Live” spoof of boy bands. [See SNL “Special Christmas Box” video at GHW. -ed.] Both fans of Obama, the two thought it would be amusing to capture, in song, their affection for the candidate at the same time the Clinton camp is holding a campaign song contest on her campaign Web site.
“We were just trying to come up with something funny,” said Kauffman, a journalism major, who said the music was influenced by the best of Top 40. “As long as there’s a venue for it, we’ll probably keep doing it.”
I have no doubt that an appetite for this kind of thing will remain.
