Ellen digs at Obama for breaking Twitter record with Oscar selfie

By Nardine Saad

March 20, 2014 11:48 AM PT

Hey, POTUS, Ellen DeGeneres is pretty smug about breaking your retweet record on Twitter while she was hosting the Oscars this month.

President Obama, a.k.a. “Michelle’s husband,” surprised DeGeneres’ studio audience when he video-chatted the gleeful daytime host from the “Ellen Blue Room.” The interview, which aired Thursday, was another attempt to tout the Affordable Care Act before the impending March 31 deadline.

On March 11, he appeared on Zach Galifianakis’ Web series, “Between Two Ferns,” to also make the plug.

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DeGeneres, who advocated Obama Care, opened up the conversation by asking the president about his household chores and responsibilities that he might have neglected in his wife’s absence. Then she brought up her famous Oscar-night selfie, which has been credited with “breaking” Twitter, broke the record previously held by the president and stands at more than 3.4 million retweets.

“I don’t know if you know this, but I was aiming to break your record of retweets, and I apologize for doing it,” DeGeneres said, “but I broke your retweet record.”

Obama held the record with a sweet photo of himself hugging his wife, Michelle, that was posted when he was releected in November 2012 and was captioned: “Four more years.” That post has been retweeted around a measly 780,000 times.

Four more years. pic.twitter.com/bAJE6Vom— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

It turns out the leader of the free world wasn’t all that impressed with the Oscar host’s herculean effort to wrangle celebrities Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Jared Leto and Kevin Spacey in the snapshot.

If only Bradley’s arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

“I heard about that. I thought it was a pretty cheap stunt myself,” Obama quipped. “Getting a bunch of celebrities in the background, you feeding them pizza.”

The selfie and DeGeneres’ pizza stunt were talking points for days after the Academy Awards and were eclipsed only by John Travolta’s Adele Dazeem gaffe.

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The Daytime Emmy-winning host also questioned the president about his latest awkward dad antics — including buying Gap sweaters for his teenage daughters and discouraging them from getting inked, threatening to get the same tattoo in the same place and take a family photo with them.

“We will reduce the cool factor of any tattoo,” he said. “Michelle and I will be right there and we’ll post it so that everybody will be able to see and we’ll say we all got matching tattoos, and I suspect that will be a pretty good deterrent for both Malia and Sasha.”

And for those wondering if the 44th president indulged in any of the wildly popular small-screen political fare, including Netflix’s “House of Cards” starring Spacey and ABC’s “Scandal” starring Kerry Washington, DeGeneres asked him about that too.

“I watch ‘House of Cards.’ I haven’t seen ‘Scandal’ yet, but Michelle has watched ‘Scandal,’ ” he said. “I have to tell ya, life in Washington is a little more boring than displayed on the screen. You know, the truth of the matter is, if you followed me, most of my day is sitting in a room listening to a bunch of folks in gray suits talking about a whole bunch of stuff that wouldn’t make very good television.”

She quipped back: “That’s what I do, and we make great television!”

Unfortunately, “there is not much dancing in the situation room,” he said.