Barack Obama wants you to know he’s cooler than you. No, really. Did you just catch Lin-sanity?  Obama tells Bill Simmons for his ESPN podcast that he heard about Jeremy Lin way before the rest of us did:

The nation’s best-known basketball fan — President Obama — says he heard about Jeremy Lin “way back when.”

“I knew about Jeremy before you did, or everybody else did,” Obama told Bill Simmons, the sports columnist and founder of the ESPN-affiliated website Grantland.com

The reason, Obama said on a Simmons podcast: Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who like Lin played college hoops at Harvard.

“And so way back when, Arne and I were playing and he said, ‘I’m telling you, we’ve got this terrific guard named Jeremy Lin at Harvard,'” Obama said. “And then one of my best friends — his son is a freshman at Harvard — and so when he went for a recruiting trip he saw Lin in action.”

“So I’ve been on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon for a while.”

But that’s not the only way Obama told Simmons that he’s so cool you could store a side of beef in him for a month, and so hip that he has difficulty seeing over his own pelvis.  Catch the start of the interview at the link, when Simmons asks Obama whether this is his first podcast:

SIMMONS: This your first podcast?

OBAMA: Well, I used to have my own podcast.

SIMMONS: What?

OBAMA: When I was a US Senator, I was way ahead of the curve on the podcast thing.

Maybe he was way ahead of the curve for US Senators, but Obama first came to the Senate in 2005.  He didn’t start podcasting until 2006, and only ever produced 15 podcasts for download (which are still accessible here), the first four of which were just recordings of dialogue at committee hearings or public events.  By 2006, most radio broadcasters had been producing podcasts for a long time; our own Northern Alliance Radio Network had been posting podcasts of our shows on Townhall since the show’s early days in 2004.

Ben Smith at BuzzFeed has fun with Obama’s claim to have been an early adopter of Linsanity, skewering him as Hipster Obama:

And what’s the name of Simmons’ video podcast series?  The BS Report.  I’d call that an apt description.  It sounds a little like this classic moment from Obama’s sports expertise:

Obama to Dibble on why he wore a White Sox fan to throw out the first pitch in Washington: “I’m a Southside kid, I gotta make sure (White Sox owner) Jerry Reinsdorf doesn’t get to angry with me.”

Dibble: “Having played with the White Sox for a short time, I know how the Cubs fans and White Sox fans go back and forth. Who was one of your favorite White Sox players growing up?”

Obama: “You know uh ….. I … I thought that … uh …. you know … the truth is a lot of the Cubs I like too! But, uh … I did not become a Sox fan until I moved to Chicago. Because I uh …. I was growing up in Hawaii so I ended up actually being an Oakland A’s fan.”

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!