President Obama showed his sillier side Thursday by posing with a “selfie stick,” sticking out his tongue and playing a rousing game of air ball in a new promotional video for HealthCare.gov.
The clip, which was produced by the video arm of the viral content experts at BuzzFeed, was online for less than an hour when it already hit 100,000 views.
“How did we get Obama to use a selfie stick?” BuzzFeed asks in the video’s teaser. “Oh, because he wants you to go to https://www.healthcare.gov/.”
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith recently sat down for an interview with Obama, who has been on a tour of less conventional media outlets as the White House ramps up its millennial outreach program ahead of the 2016 election cycle.
About 7.75 million people have signed up for health insurance using the federal exchange, the Department Health and Human Services announced Wednesday, with “millions more” signups coming through state exchanges.
Health officials have pulled out all the stops in the past two weeks to meet their goal of 9 million new and continuing enrollees by Feb. 15, several million fewer than the administration’s initial target.
Obama himself has engaged on other nontraditional platforms to push for more signups on the website created by his namesake healthcare law.
Perhaps most memorably, during a previous enrollment period in early 2014, the president touted the federal exchange in an interview with “Between Two Ferns” with host Zach Galifianakis. He also gave a trio of interviews to YouTube stars last month following his State of the Union speech.
In the BuzzFeed promotional video, Obama does a few takes in front of the mirror with his pitch encouraging people to sign up for health insurance on the marketplace before the current enrollment period ends on Sunday.
The BuzzFeed video crew also got the president to pencil a drawing of first lady Michelle Obama and make a pass at dunking a healthy-sized cookie into a slim-rimmed glass of milk. “Thanks, Obama,” the president mutters in disappointment.
The video comes just two days after publication of Buzzfeed’s interview with Obama, where he weighed in on his gay marriage position and U.S. operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, among other topics.
“They didn’t let me see this in advance,” Smith tweeted Thursday, linking to the video.
This post wad updated at 2:37 p.m.