Obama’s White House correspondents dinner act shatters YouTube record
With nearly 7 million views in just five days, President Obama’s speech at the White House correspondents dinner Saturday is now the most-watched Obama public speech on YouTube, C-SPAN said Thursday.
The video shows Obama poking fun at the recent birth certificate controversy and his reliance on a teleprompter. But perhaps its biggest selling point is Obama’s roasting of would-be presidential rival Donald Trump.
Just 36 hours after giving the go order for the mission that would kill Osama bin Laden, Obama sarcastically praised Trump for his leadership and decision-making on “Celebrity Apprentice.”
“You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night,” he said.
The video on C-SPAN’s YouTube channel just passed video of Obama’s 2008 speech on race in Philadelphia, which was uploaded by his campaign. That video has more than 6,763,000 views, about 4,000 fewer than the correspondents dinner clip.
White House video of the president’s announcement that Bin Laden was killed had 4,743,262 views as of 4 p.m. ET Thursday.
Video of comedian Seth Meyers’ remarks, in which he joked that Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight as host of a poorly-watched C-SPAN talk show, has nearly 2 million views, making it the fourth-most viewed clip on C-SPAN’s YouTube channel.
michael.memoli@latimes.com