Barack Obama will deliver the last State of the Union of his presidency this evening, and the internet is expecting that shit to be lit. Not just because we’re hoping he uses the opportunity to finally let her rip, valedictorian speech-style, but also because he teased this thing with a Hollywood blockbuster style trailer worthy of Die Hard or a less verbose Aaron Sorkin vehicle.
This SOTU trailer is the true definition of a summer matinee epic, and the whole internet appears to have the popcorn all the way popped. He could do worse than to package his accomplishments this way—the fools who want to ignore his legacy will at least be distracted by the dramatic score, which sounds like the equivalent of a human-sized bald eagle flying through the cerulean skies next to an F-15 painted with the American flag on it.
But Obama’s true music of choice is from the Broadway smash Hamilton, which he demonstrated through a little subliminal and nod to the Ham Stans with his tweet “One last time,” which both refers to his final SOTU and, possibly, the eponymously titled song performed by Hamilton’s “George Washington,” played by Christopher Jackson.
In Hamilton’s “One Last Time,” President Washington tells his confidante Alexander Hamilton that he’s “stepping down, he’s not running for president.” The chorus:
One last time
Relax, have a drink with me
One last time
Let’s take a break tonight
And then we’ll teach them how to say goodbye
To say goodbye
You and I
Perhaps even more subliminally, the song serves as Washington’s parting advice to the future president—advice Obama certainly feels in his no-doubt weary bones:
I wanna talk about neutrality/I wanna warn against partisan fighting
Obama has seen Hamilton twice; in a recent roundtable with New York, cast member Renee Elizabeth Goldsberry spoke about how much it meant to her to see him there:
REG: The height of this whole hype was when Obama came a second time and spoke from the stage. We got to sit in the wing as a company and patter back and forth with him in the beginning of his speech. I don’t know that it’s possible for that to be topped in my lifetime. That went beyond what my biggest dream was, which was that I would one day perform for a president. Then it was this president, and he came back.
Like his recent meeting with Kendrick Lamar, this is Obama demonstrating his natural cultural acumen in a time when Hillary Clinton is out here trying to dab and shred, which is painfully beside the point.
This generation loves Obama because he is inherently cool, but that isn’t what makes him a good president; it’s just an accoutrement and you can’t fake it. That’s why, if he does show up in a durag and blazing sparklers this evening, as Twitter very much hopes he’ll do, it will be an earnest and proper send-off to a man who is truly outchea.
Contact the author at julianne@jezebel.com.
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