Goodness.
The former community organizer stumbles and misspells “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” at a White House performance Thursday.
“When Aretha first told us what R-S-P-E-C-T meant to her…”
Oops.
Thankfully, the White House stenographer scrubbed the mistake from the record.
The Hill reported:
The White House stenographer appears to have given President Obama a little too much “respect.”
Introducing soul legend Aretha Franklin at a White House performance Thursday night, the president flubbed the spelling of her signature song.
“When Aretha first told us what R-S-P-E-C-T meant to her…” Obama said, prompting laughter from the crowd.
The president’s face betrayed that he had misspelled the anthem, but he did not stop to correct himself before adding that Franklin “had no idea it would become a rallying cry for African-Americans, and women, and then everyone who felt marginalized because of what they looked like or who they loved.
“They wanted some respect,” Obama said. “Later, when somebody asked her why it had such an impact, she said, ‘I guess everybody just wants a little respect.’ Today, they still do.”
But anyone reading the official transcript of the event provided by the White House would have had no idea of the president’s mistake. In that version, the president correctly spells out the word.
But Dan Quayle was an idiot for tacking an “e” on “potato.”