Political Virals

We’ve seen many viral political videos over the past several months but “Wassup 2008” is off the charts. Posted on YouTube October 24th, it has already received nearly 2,500,000 views, pull in approximately 500,000 a day. That certainly qualifies for “ultra viral” status.  

The video is so popular, that according to the website Shifting the Debate’s Political Video Barometer, it has been linked to by over 390 bloggers. 

For those too young to remember, the phrase “Wassup” became an instant pop culture phenomenon after it was used in a Budweiser advertisement during 1999’s Superbowl. I myself had to listen to my husband, brothers, and other males who used it regularly after the commercial first aired - and it’ll happen again.

This time, Wassup 2008 isn’t an advertisement for beer; instead, it blends humor with reality and focuses on the current and difficult circumstances people are facing today, such as being stationed in a war zone, having no health insurance, losing big in the stock market, enduring natural disasters, and unemployment. 

The Wassup 2008 video features five men; one has just lost his job, another is stationed in Iraq, one guy has no health insurance and is need of prescriptions, one is in shock as he watches stocks plummet online, and the last guy is outside in a hurricane.  At the end, the soldier in Iraq asks the man who lost his job, “So what’s up, B?” The man smiles and the cameras pan to the television and we see why— he’s watching a video of Barack and Michelle Obama.  He then nods his head and replies, “Change.”