Music Video Has a 'Crush on Obama'

Rather, she is a fictitious creation.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has a legion of young supporters including one who has dedicated a song to the presidential hopeful.

(Ben Relles)

The song was performed by Leah Kauffman, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Temple University in Philadelphia, who wrote the lyrics with a friend, 32-year-old advertising executive Ben Relles, and the music with her producer, Rick Friedrich.

An actress/model named Amber Lee Ettinger then lip-synched the song for the video, shot by filmmakers found on Craigslist two hours before Relles and Ettinger hit New York City one Friday in May to shoot the video on a DV camera.

"Not including the hours we spent working on it, it probably cost a couple thousand dollars," said Relles, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business, who said he did it for fun, not money, but is also selling "Obamagirl" and "I Got a Crush on Obama" T-shirts.

Relles said the idea for "I Got a Crush on Obama" came after he and Kauffman received some media notice for a previous collaboration that was a female take on a recent "Saturday Night Live" spoof of boy bands. Both fans of Obama, the two thought it would be amusing to capture, in song, their affection for the candidate at the same time the Clinton camp is holding a campaign song contest on her campaign Web site.

"We were just trying to come up with something funny," said Kauffman, a journalism major, who said the music was influenced by the best of Top 40. "As long as there's a venue for it, we'll probably keep doing it."

Also making waves this year is a video clip of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., briefly singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," which garnered more than 850,000 hits. In 2006, a flip remark by then-Sen. George Allen, a Virginia Republican, in which he called an Indian-American Democratic campaign operative a "macaca," posted to the Internet and helped end a once-promising political career.

Relles said his team had no contact at all with the Obama campaign.

"We hope it helps him, though," he adds.