Former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush was mocked mercilessly during the 2016 GOP primary for jokingly encouraging his audience to applaud one of his campaign stump lines.
“Please clap,” he said in his characteristically deadpan style.
Unfortunately for Bush, humor delivered in the style of Steven Wright doesn’t translate well over social media, and many were left with a rather sad looking image of the former governor. The line went on to become an oft-repeated punchline during the 2016 election, and his “please clap” request sort of became synonymous with the notion of pitiable helplessness.
On a totally unrelated note, hundreds of Obama supporters are meeting in Washington, D.C., next week to clap for the president, according to the Washington Post.
That’s literally the entire purpose of the gathering: To meet at a designated time and place to applaud Obama.
“To say a final ‘Thanks Obama,’ thousands of Americans to applaud together on his last day,” read the story’s headline.
Oh boy.
The opening paragraph reads, “It was months before America would elect Donald Trump as its president, and already Bejidé Davis was worried that the country hadn’t appreciated Barack Obama.”
Her brother jokingly suggested that she show her appreciation by giving the president a “fifth-grade clap out.” From there, Davis, 29, got the idea to go with a group of friends to the nation’s capital with the explicit purpose of convening at a specific time and place to simply applaud Obama.
She set up a Facebook page for the idea, and the idea soon blew up into something much bigger.
The Post reported: “She went to bed that night and when she woke up less than eight hours later, 500 people had clicked that they planned to attend and another 700 marked that they were interested … By the Friday after Election Day, another 60,000 people said they were either going or wanted to.”
The original idea was to meet outside the White House on the night before the inauguration and applaud the president from the street. But the number of people who said they’d attend grew and grew, so the event’s organizers looked into seeing if they could meet at a nearby park owned by the federal government. D.C., is notoriously bureaucratic, and the organizers were unable to obtain the permits necessary to allow such a large gathering outside the White House.
So now everyone is meeting at an “arts club” located two and a half miles from the White House, the Post noted. The club holds up to 600 occupants. Tickets sold out in less than seven days.
The party is expected to last for several hours. At exactly 7:00 pm ET, the crowd will drop everything and applaud the president.
The Post added of the planned event, “In addition to the clap out, the organizers have also asked people between now and the day Obama leaves office to tweet thank you messages to him, tagging their handle, @thanksobamateam, and @BarackObama.”
“They’re also encouraging people to change their profile picture to one of the Obama family. And they’ve created a separate community page on Facebook for people to leave and read messages of gratitude after the event is over,” it added.
It’s pretty cool that Davis took the initiative to set up the “clap out,” and that she has gone through all the thankless tasks involved in setting up an event of this size.
It’s just sort of funny that after the 2016 presidential election, Obama supporters are literally asking each other to “please clap.”
That this story is filed under the Post’s “Inspired Life” blog is just icing on the cake.
