Grads Lament 'Obama That I Used to Know'
He may still draw huge crowds of screaming fans, but after four years of high unemployment, two college graduates are lamenting that President Obama is not "the Obama that I used to know."
In a video posted online this week, Justin Monticello and Ryan Newbrough, both Harvard University graduates, replaced the lyrics of Goyte's hit summer song "Somebody that I Used to Know" with a downtrodden ballad mourning Obama's unfulfilled promises.
Intermixed with inspirational lines from Obama's 2008 campaign speeches, are lyrics like, "It felt like change and it's a hope I still remember… But the change I got was that I moved in with my mother."
"Because you won and they you cut me off," Monticello sings in the video, which now has more than 310,000 views on YouTube. "Now your speeches never soar as high as unemployment. You took Obamacare so far, but you left me like a dog strapped on Romney's car."
Newbrough, who co-wrote the lyrics with Monticello, said in a CNN interview on Thursday that the "disappointment" they expressed in the video stems from the fact that Obama "hasn't exactly delivered everything we thought he could."
"I think the main goal that we had in making this was first to be funny and reach people but in general just to kind of highlight a few of these things that we thought were less dependent on the political circumstances and more dependent on Obama's will to do things," Monticello told ABC News.
The pair said Gotye's song was the "perfect metaphor" for how they felt about Obama because it compares their relationship with the president to a "real relationship gone sour," Monticello said.
"People feel they had invested so much in Obama on what he had said and what he was capable of and it just hasn't happened that way," he said.
The Harvard graduate-turned-director said that he and Newbrough, the video's co-creator, were "swept up" in Obama's fervor last election but are undecided on who to vote for this year.
"Hopefully he will go back to his campaign promises and I will put my support behind him again," Monticello said.
The video goes on to criticize Obama for failing to close Guantanamo Bay, stimulate the economy, having a "kill list" and stepping up the prosecution of drug users.
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Monticello and Newbrough's parody is one of many that has hit YouTube using Gotye's song. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the individual mandate in the president's health care law, two law students catalogued what they deemed Chief Justice John Robert's "betrayal" in voting to uphold the mandate.
"But you didn't have to rule that way, make out like it's constitutional and that it's a tax," sings Kathleen Burch in the video. "I guess that I don't need your vote. Now you're just some justice that I used to know."