And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [76]
Al candidato quien es Barack Obama, Este corrido le canto con el alma, Humilde fue nacido tambien sin pretencion, Emprezo por las calles de Chicago, Trabajando pa’ lograr una vision, Pa’ proteger la gente trabajadora, Y traernos todo juntos,
En esta gran nacion, ¡Viva Obama! (¡Viva!) ¡Viva Obama! (¡Viva!) Familias unidas, seguras y hasta, Con plan de salud7
Around the same time, in Naperville, Illinois, a twelve-year-old boy was finding fans for a different sort of corrido. When Chaz Yario sang a song to Obama in his science class, he landed in detention. So he video-taped himself singing the song in front of an American flag, put the video on YouTube, and accompanied it with a note: “I got a detention for singing this song in class so i need your help. I want to meet obama so he can sign my detention slip the more people you send it to the more likely it will get back to barack. thsnk 4 your help. Enjoy!!” The song was called “Hey There Obama” (a goof on “Hey There Delilah,” then a popular song by a band called the Plain White T’s), and it was a spare, mournful acoustic number:
Hey there Obama What’s it like in Washington, D.C.? You want to be the president And that would make history Yes it would I think you should be the president
Yes you should I know that you could ... Barack Obama superstar Bet you have a nice car Oh forget Hillary I watch you on the TV Oh it’s time for democracy And you will win probably Will win probably
Watching Chaz’s video, which at this writing had gotten more than 160,000 views, it became apparent just how doomed Hillary Clinton’s campaign was, at least in the annals of popular culture. Obama had become the sort of celebrity that a gawky, twelve-year-old white boy could become cool just by association with him.
The best online video of the 2008 primary season was a product of incredible serendipity. Outside a Democratic debate in Hollywood, an amateur videographer ambushed an Obama supporter and began to press him on the candidate’s programs. The supporter was young and black, and wore a baseball cap and a choker necklace made of shells; his interlocutor, off camera, took a hectoring tone, his voice seemingly older, slightly nasal. “So why are you for Obama?” the older man asks on the video, and at first the young man seems to stumble.
“Because I feel like he is—the best qualified candidate. I think that he’s got an excellent chance to win, especially against McCain. I think that he—”
The off-camera voice cuts in. “Why is he the best qualified?”
“Well, I feel like he’s a person who actually represents a positive change in society and who can bring together a broad swath of people—”
“How is he doing that, specifically? Do you have any specifics?”
But slowly, as the two men parry over the course of a five-minute conversation, the Obama supporter—who in fact was a ringer of sorts, a Harvard-educated musician and media activist named Derrick Ashong—turns the tables on his questioner, overwhelming him with precisely the specifics the viewer has feared he doesn’t possess. “With Obama’s program,” Ashong says, his once-laconic tone growing ever more engaged, more pointed, “we have subsidies for people who can’t afford to pay, and that is something that we don’t have now. . . . I don’t think that we want to create a market for health care per se. We don’t want futures traded in health care, for example. I think that we’ve got to be more measured in how we approach it. Because we don’t want to leave people out. You’re going to have all kind of rising costs if people don’t actually get access to health care.” Now it is Ashong who will not let his interlocutor get a word in edgewise. “The other thing is, we’ve got so much, like—secondary health care,