Barack Obama surprises wife Michelle at book tour stop

Christian Holub
Updated

Barack Obama isn’t afraid to make Jay-Z comparisons. When the former president made a surprise appearance at a stop on his wife Michelle’s book tour Saturday night, he likened himself to the New York rapper stopping by a concert by wife Beyoncé.

“This is like – you know when Jay-Z comes out during the Beyoncé concert? … Like, ‘Crazy in Love?'” Obama said, according to CNN, referencing the husband-and-wife music team performing their iconic collaborations together. “It’s the same thing. It’s just a little sample to enhance the concert.”

“Look who dropped by!” former first lady Michelle Obama later wrote on Twitter.

The focus of the tour, though, is still squarely on Michelle, who recently published her memoir Becoming, the first in the massive book deal the Obamas signed with Penguin Random House last year. Per EW’s review, “Becoming arrives like a glass bottle of decency, preserved from a nationwide garbage fire. This is a straightforward, at times rather dry autobiography from a major public figure that stands in remarkably sharp contrast to the state of our discourse — starting with the man in the White House.”

The Saturday stop in Washington, where the president dropped in, was moderated by former presidential advisor Valerie Jarrett (the first stop, in Chicago, had been moderated by Oprah Winfrey). When he made his brief appearance on stage, an audience member reportedly yelled “We miss you!” EW’s Seija Rankin, covering the tour opening in Chicago earlier this month, wrote that the overall vibe was an “indication of the emotional wellspring that Obama elicits in her adoring public; tears were not a rarity in the crowd.”