Bob Tomaszewski
Staff Writer
The president’s State of the Union address was a success especially through the Internet and social media. Twitter and Facebook helped share the comedy that was happening on Vine and Youtube. It is similar to the #mconnelling videos, a trend that originated when Sen. Mitch McConnell released a video of himself with no audio, allowing people to add their own sounds and music.
The line of the night was at the end of President Obama’s speech, “I have no more campaigns to run,” Obama dramatically paused before continuing, “I know because I won both of them.” This led to many mic-drop edits of the video, and the Internet went wild.
This idea now has a life of its own. Like life, it is continuously evolving into GIFs, into Vines, and with new twists being added. Photoshopping Obama’s face onto the character from the rap battle parody is currently the most popular, although other political celebrities’ faces are also being Photoshopped into the GIF version.
One of the many topics discussed was community college. Sen. Rand Paul responded to the State of the Union address with a Twitter meme of a condescending Willy Wonka.
The meme draws attention to the total of $60 billion over 10 years that Obama’s proposed plan for community colleges would cost. Rand Paul had his own video response.
Joni Ernst, a Republican from Iowa, responded to the State of the Union. One of her anecdotes involved a story about wearing bread bags over her shoes on rainy days. One meme was of Morpheus from the “Matrix” criticizing the effectiveness of wearing bread-bag shoes.
Ernst was not the only Republican to respond with a video. Republican Marco Rubio also responded to the State of the Union address with a video in which he took a water break. The water break brought Rubio 13,000 new Twitter followers overnight according to the Chicago Tribune. In an interview on “Good Morning America,” Rubio said, “I needed water. What am I going to do?” The brand of the water bottle, Poland Spring, responded to the video with this photo.
