"Crush on Obama" is an Internet

viral video A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email.Lu Jiang, Yajie Miao, Yi Yang, ZhenZhong Lan, Alexander Haupt ...

, first posted on

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

in June 2007 featuring a young woman seductively singing of her love for then-U.S.

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(later

President President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) *President (education), a leader of a college or university *President (government title) President may also refer to: Automobiles * Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ful ...

)

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the U ...

Background

The video was produced by BarelyPolitical.com, was lip-synched for the video by actress and model

Amber Lee Ettinger Amber Lee Ettinger (born October 2, 1982) is an American actress, Internet celebrity, model, and singer. Ettinger became notable after being hired to portray Obama Girl in Barely Political's June 2007 Internet video " Crush on Obama", in which ...

, and

Leah Kauffman Leah Kauffman (born c. 1986) is an American singer and songwriter who is responsible for singing and writing popular viral videos, including "My Box in a Box", " I Got a Crush... on Obama", " Obama Girl vs. Giuliani Girl", "I Like a Boy", and ...

(of " My Box in a Box" fame) provided the vocals. The concept was the brainchild of 32-year-old advertising executive

Ben Relles Ben Relles (born 1975) is an American businessman. He was formerly the Head of Comedy at YouTube, as part of the company's YouTube Originals program. In this role, he oversaw development of new content from YouTube's top comedy talent. Currently ...

. "Crush on Obama" was co-written and produced by Rick Friedrich. The creators sold two shirts and the red shorts used in the video in an

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auction. One of the shirts garnered $1,000. Proceeds from the auction were donated to the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness. On May 25, 2007 Ben Relles placed an ad on the online classified website, Craigslist, seeking a music video director. The ad was answered by filmmakers Kevin Arbouet and Larry Strong. Filming began later that same day in and around various

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

landmarks. Arbouet and Strong co-directed and shot the entire video in about six hours. The whole film project took approximately two to three weeks. On June 13, 2007 the video was posted to the video sharing website

and garnered over one thousand views within the first five hours of its posting. By the second day the American news media had taken notice of the video's growing popularity. Relles, Ettinger and Kauffman appeared on many television news programs. The video was nominated in the Politics category in the 2007

YouTube Awards The YouTube Awards (also known as the YouTube Video Awards) was a promotion run by the video-sharing website YouTube to recognize the best user-generated videos of the year. The awards were presented twice, in 2007 and 2008, with winners being vo ...

Obama's response

When asked about the video by the ''

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'' on June 18, 2007, Obama said, "It's just one more example of the fertile imagination of the Internet. More stuff like this will be popping up all the time." Obama told the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...

that the Obama Girl video had upset his daughters and said, "You do wish people would think about what impact their actions have on kids and families." Obama's campaign stated they had nothing to do with the video's creation. Kauffman and Ettinger confirmed this during their June 15, 2007 appearance on '' Fox & Friends'', where they said that the video was not made to support Barack Obama in his campaign but rather for fun. They also expressed interest in making more videos of the same genre for other candidates of other parties as well.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2007 songs Songs about Barack Obama Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign American political satire films 2008 United States presidential election in popular culture Viral videos Songs written by Leah Kauffman 2007 YouTube videos Internet memes introduced in 2007