It was sort of an appearance on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” but more a case of “Late Night” going to where President Obama was – talking to college students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill – to snag him for what Fallon called the “holy crap edition” of the show Tuesday.
The appearance of Obama came when Fallon was about to do a familiar sketch with The Roots. “I’m President Barack Obama, and I, too, want to slow jam the news.”
As the band crooned “the POTUS with the mostest,” he spoke in syncopation about keeping interest low on student loan rates.
The mid afternoon crowd, taping for a show that comes on at half past midnight, were elated.
Tickets for the show at campus’ Memorial Hall were hard to come by. Among those who couldn’t get inFallon said in his monologue, were “students, professors, Joe Biden.”
Preparing for the show on campus, Fallon says he had been “having the best time hanging out with the Secret Service.”
He said he was sure Obama wouldn’t pander to students there, though he said he thought it strange when he changed his campaign slogan from “Yes We Can” to “Duke sucks.”
Fallon’s not the greatest interviewer on late night, but he let the President go from sports (“You gotta go with the Bulls”) to favorite movies (“I’ll date myself when people ask me what kind of comedies I like, I’ll say ‘Groundhog Day’”).
But mostly Obama got to talk about the high points of his campus speech, regarding student loan relief. “We didn’t finish paying off all of our student loans until about eight years ago, and I’m president of the United States.”