The two may barely be on talking terms these days, but President Barack Obama had some good-humoured jabs for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at an annual event where the US commander-in-chief instantly turns into a comedian-in-chief, poking fun at political rivals, the media and himself.
Just a day after threatening Russia with tougher sanctions over the Ukraine crisis, here was Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, quipping that Putin may be on course for the next Nobel Peace Prize.
“To be fair, they give those to just anybody these days,” he remarked. After all, Obama himself became a Nobel laureate within months of entering the White House in 2009. Critics had then wondered precisely what Obama had accomplished to merit the Nobel.
Often at the receiving end of Republican criticism of his “weak foreign policy”, Obama trained his guns on the conservatives and their media guns, commenting that “the new conservative darling is none other than Vladimir Putin”.
“Rudy Giuliani (New York’s former Republican mayor) said Putin is what you call a leader, Mike Huckabee (former Republican presidential hopeful) and Sean Hannity (conservative television host) keep talking about his (Putin’s) bare chest, which is kind of weird,” Obama said amid much laughter from the 2,600-strong audience at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
As is almost mandatory at this fun-filled evening, Obama, like his predecessors, was at his self-deprecating best as well. He joked about his pet project, “Obamacare”, whose launch turned out to be a big embarrassment because of website glitches that would not go away easily.
“Of course we rolled out healthcare.gov. That could have gone better,” Obama said, remarking: “In 2008 my slogan was ‘Yes we can’. In 2013, my slogan was ‘Control-Alt-Delete’.”
Obama had a dig at CNN’s more than month-long saturation coverage of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane to the virtual exclusion of all else.
“I am happy to be here, even though I am a little jet-lagged from my trip to Malaysia,” Obama said, quipping: “The lengths we have to go to get CNN coverage these days. I think they’re still searching for their table.”
Turning to the conservative Fox News, a trenchant critic of Obama all through, he commented: “let’s face it, Fox. You’ll miss me when I’m gone. It’ll be harder to convince the American people that Hillary was born in Kenya.” Obama’s supposed birth in Kenya had been an obsession with Fox for months in the run-up to the 2008 race.
Never one to miss an opportunity to take on the Republicans, notably Speaker John Boehner, Obama commented: “These days, House Republicans are giving (Boehner) a harder time than they give me — which means orange really is the new black.” The reference was to the Speaker’s tanned skin.