World

Barack Obama Makes Youtube History With Speech he Wrote Himself

by Rob Walker | March 20, 2008 at 09:42 am

1326 views | 1 Recommendation | 1 comment

If Barack Obama didn't make american History with his 'A More Perfect Union' speech, he certainly made youtube history, raking in 1.2 million views in the first 24 hours of its posting.
Obama is also gaining distinction as the first presidential candidate since Nixon to write his own speeches. Not necessarily the best person to follow, but a 30 year gap is pretty significant. It's been a while since someone this intelligent and well spoken ran for office of the president.

Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech is the most popular video in the world today, drawing an unusual 1.2 million full views in its first 24 hours on YouTube – double the views of the next most popular clips.
YouTube only counts visitors who watch an entire video, so hundreds of thousands of additional visitors probably watched part of the 37-minute address.

The most popular video on YouTube has no lip-synching Chinese teenagers, no babies falling over, no drunk cats: It's Barack Obama's speech on race.
So far, the Obama speech has been clicked on 1.6 million times —though it's not possible to tell whether viewers watched all 37 minutes.

That speech today? The one that has pundits--from the liberal David Corn at The Nation ("This is as sophisticated a discussion of race as any American politician has sought to present to the public") to the conservative Charles Murray, of National Review Online ("it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols."), and those inbetween--noting the brilliance, sophistication, sincerity and candor of the words spoken by Obama? That speech?

He wrote it himself.

Once more, with feeling:

He wrote it. Himself.

Barack Obama did. He wrote it.