Obama and Jay-Z swap parenting advice
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President Barack Obama isn't just talking about the economy and Libya these days, or even about the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. No, the leader of the free world, in a tight re-election battle, has another topic in mind – at least when he chats with his friend and supporter, rapper Jay-Z: Parenting.
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And not just parenting, but parenting a baby. A girl baby.
If you recall, Jay-Z and his wife, pop star Beyonce, welcomed daughter Blue Ivy Carter this past January. (Other patients at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York certainly remember; the celebrity couple reportedly paid well over $1 million to seal off a wing of the facility and hire a fleet of security guards, sparking annoyance among other families trying to visit their loved ones.)
Since then, Jay-Z has talked regularly about how head-over-heels he feels toward little Blue Ivy. Soon after her birth, he wrote the song "Glory," which featured her crying and landed on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip Hop songs chart, with lyrics like: "The most amazing feeling I feel/ Words can't describe what a feeling, for real/ Baby I'll paint the sky blue/ My greatest creation was you."
(The song also has the line: "You don't yet know what swag is but baby you was made in Paris," but whatever.)
Then Jay-Z made the modern daddy announcement that really what he wanted to do was to stay home from work for a little bit and just soak up his baby girl. The moms out there swooned.
Still, during a recent interview with Cleveland, Ohio radio station Z1079, Mr. Obama said that he had told Jay-Z to make sure that he was doing his part to be a hands-on dad.
"I made sure that Jay-Z was helping Beyonce out and not just leaving it all to mom and the mother-in-law," Obama said. This isn't because the Dad-in-Chief - father of Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11 - has any worries about Jay-Z. It's just what he talks about with his guy friends, he explained.
"I've gotten to know these guys over the past several years," Obama said about Jay-Z and Beyonce. "We talk about the same things I talk about with all my friends. We talk about kids, and they just had a new baby, they have a new daughter."
All politics aside, it's hard not to appreciate the father focus here. There has been so much rhetoric about moms this election, it's nice to hear about dads – even in a limited, celebrity-style way.
And really, regardless of your Romney-Obama preference, wouldn't it be cool to get some parenting tips from the Oval Office? I wonder what the prez would say about Baby M's sleep problems these days.
But in case you didn't feel a wee bit envious that these new parents get advice from POTUS, check out this other recent celebrity news about Beyonce and Jay-Z: They, apparently, have date night.
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Now we're really jealous.