YouTube Stars Surprise Critics With Real Questions for Obama

Despite the jeers from the White House press corps, three YouTube celebrities who interviewed President Barack Obama brought out some questions that were more substantive than had been expected.

The interviews did have some light moments, such as when GloZell Green sent some of her signature green lipstick home with Obama for his "first wife" and daughters, or when Hank Green (no relation to GloZell) asked Obama for his autograph, reports Mediaite. Further, both Greens and Bethany Mota posed for a silly selfie with the president.

The three stars are immensely popular on YouTube. GloZell Green's videos attract 3 million followers, Mota has 8 million followers, and Hank Green, who records with his brother, attracts 2.4 million followers, reports CNN.

But both Greens and Mota, who is more famous for giving makeup tips for teenagers than she is for hard-hitting interviews with the commander-in-chief, brought out questions about race relations, drones, Cuba, and the legalization of marijuana. And Mota asked questions about the threat of the Boko Haram terrorist organization, a topic that has not gotten a great deal of handling from the press corps or the mainstream media.

Last Thursday, though, during a White House press conference, the attitude of the press corps was nowhere more apparent than when CNN correspondent Jim Acosta told White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest that he was curious that "'Charlie Bit My Finger' or 'David After Dentist' [were] not available" to interview the president.

Earnest said he had not seen either of those YouTube clips, and said Obama's interviews were no different than Google Hangout sessions the president had done in the past.

Further, not all of the questions were easy ones, as critics had feared.

For example, video blogger Hank Green got the president to admit that more states will likely join Colorado and Washington and legalize marijuana, and that the federal government is "not going to spend a lot of resources" to enforce the federal law in those states.

Meanwhile, GloZell Green, who has drawn nearly 10 million YouTube views for a video of herself eating cereal from her bathtub, turned serious when talking about race relations, telling the president how she'd cut the hoods off her husband's sweatshirts in hopes of protecting him from police violence.

And Mota, who asked what the United States could do to prevent more death in Nigeria at Boko Haram's hands, heard from Obama an admission that the government's help "has not been as effective as it needs to be," when it came to protecting citizens and finding the hundreds of schoolgirls the terrorists kidnapped last year.

But that's not to say some of the questions weren't unusual, reports CNN. Mota asked Obama what super power he would want to have (he said he'd like to fly), and GloZell Green, when asking Obama about Cuba, commented that former leader Fidel Castro "puts the d*** in dictatorship."

As of Friday morning, the interviews, posted on the White House's YouTube page, had attracted just short of 700,000 views.

Watch the video here.

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