James Kotecki: He's Baaack!
BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, November 28 2011
He may have reached the ripe old age of 26 and no longer as novel as when he was in college interviewing presidential candidates in his dorm room at Georgetown, but James Kotecki is still hilarious.
The fast-talking comedian, online video producer and political commentator rose to fame in 2008 after Politico hired him to create a daily video blog that poked fun at the day’s news and political events. After the election, Kotecki joined the Cypress Group, a political intelligence group in Washington, D.C., as a researcher and analyst. But he kept his YouTube channel, “Emergency Cheese,” which still has 5,759 subscribers, and in early October he started posting daily commentary independently again.
Monday’s video is entitled “Newt vs. Mitt – the Lamest Battle,” in which Kotecki skewers the two leading Republican presidential candidates for their relative obscurity in the minds of those who are not political junkies (see below.)
This time around, he’s posting the videos from various locales in Durham, North Carolina, where he now lives, and the videos are simpler and shorter than those that he created at Politico.
Kotecki says that so far in this presidential cycle he feels that he’s focused much more on Republicans’ foibles in the presidential race than Democrats’.
“You have a debate almost every single week, and almost every single week the Republicans say something silly,” he says. “In 2008 there wasn’t any thought that a third-tier candidate would achieve something, but now we’re all holding our breath to see which third-tier candidate might achieve frontrunner status.”
But it’s not just the Republican presidential candidates that Kotecki has his eye on.
Thanksgiving brought forth pun-filled commentary about the need for Barack Obama to “grow some butter balls,” and to keep a tight leash on Washington “bird brains,” and not let the politicians “gobble up tax-payer dollars and then waddle on to the gravy train.”
And the so-called Super Committee’s failure to reach a deal on cutting the deficit inspired the following response from Kotecki below.
There may be many more political voices on YouTube in 2011 than 2008, and the medium might have become a humdrum part of political life, but the rawness of independent voices like Kotecki’s, and the ability to bring an off-beat and original point of view to news in short clips, is still something that makes online video sites like YouTube feel compelling and more interesting to watch than much of the mainstream media.