Valerie Jarrett said Wednesday morning that she was behind convincing President Obama to do the “Funny or Die” video to encourage young people to sign up for Obamacare.
“What is it like to be the last black president?” Hangover actor Zach Galifianakis quips in the clip.
“What is it like for this to be the last time you ever talk to a president?” Obama responds.
Obama gave a pitch about signing up under the healthcare law by the end-of-the-month deadline, to which Galifianakis zones out and quips “Is this about drones?”
Jarrett told MSNBC “it wasn’t hard to get him to participate” and “so far has been overwhelmingly successful.”
“I was checking how many hits were on the site last night. When I went to bed it was 10 million, which I’m sure breaks all kinds of records,” she said of the video, which has 12 million views today. “But, also more importantly than that, the traffic on our website has gone up 40 percent between yesterday and today. And that was the goal.”
“The goal is to help reach that young audience, and Zach and the guys at Funny Or Die they have huge followings,” Jarrett continued. “Every young person I know watches their videos on YouTube. And so how we reach them in a way that was amusing and entertaining, but yet informative. And the fact that the website traffic has gone up is really an indication that it’s working.”
Department of Health and Human Services officials, though, reported a .6% conversion rate Tuesday afternoon with 19,000 visitors following the link to heatlhcare.gov when the video was at 3 million views. That doesn’t indicate how many of those visitors actually signed up for Obamacare.
Jarrett claimed, though, that “people are signing up.”
“We released yesterday our numbers for the month of February, so 4.2 million folks have signed up. And, we now still have several weeks to go. March 31st is the deadline… I hope you go on the website today, healthcare.gov. It’s working just fine.”
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