News and Notes

News and Commentary from the Who2 Staff

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Barack Obama Didn't Insult Special Olympics Kids in Quite the Way You May Have Heard He Did

This week the New York Times repeated a common misstatement about the bad joke Barack Obama made to Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in March.

"[Obama] had to make another apology after joking that his bad bowling skills qualified him for the Special Olympics."

That isn't what Obama said, although it's almost always reported that way. Since even The Times is still reporting it that way, it seems worth setting the record straight.

The set up: After talking with Obama about the economy for 15 minutes, Leno turned to some light chatter about the White House. See the video for yourself -- in this short version from ABC News, or in the complete version from NBC (at about 3:55 from the end).

The transcript:

Leno: "Are they going to put a basketball -- I imagine the bowling alley has been just burned and closed down."
Obama: "No no. I've been pract-- I have been practicing bowling..."
Leno: "Really. Really!"
Obama: "I ah, I bowled a 129...which..."
(Audience cheers and laughter)
Obama: "Yes, I had... I..."
(Obama laughs as he spots Leno half-hiding a "that's terrible" face.)
Leno (clapping and falsely encouraging): "Oh no, that's very good, yeah. No, that's very good, Mr. President."
Obama (laughing) says a few unintelligible syllables, then: "This is like, this is like Special Olympics or something."
Leno: (Making another comic face) "No, that, that... no, that's very good."
Obama: "The, ah... no, no, listen, I, I, ah, I'm... I'm making progress on, on the bowling. Yeah."

Obama is clearly not "joking that his bad bowling skills qualified him for the Special Olympics." He's joking that Leno's phony praise is like the Special Olympics practice of praising every competitor no matter how they perform.

The joke is, "Your praise for my bad score is like the praise for competitors with low scores at the Special Olympics."

It was still a dumb, tone-deaf joke, for sure. (Should a president ever make a joke containing the two words "Special Olympics"? Probably not.) But to my mind there's a huge difference between saying "I bowled as bad as a handicapped kid" -- which is cruel -- and the wisecrack-gone-wrong remark the President actually made.

Had Obama meant to say he bowled like he was in the Special Olympics, he would have said "IT was like the Special Olympics" or "THAT was like" or even "I was like." But he didn't.

The clincher is on the video: As he says the line, Obama actually gestures toward Leno (who is milking laughs with another "that's terrible" face).

Still, for whatever reason, the joke was almost uniformly misreported the next day (including by ABC News in that story linked above). Some were worse than others. The LA Times:

"It's like -- it was like Special Olympics or something," the president said, prompting laughter from the audience.

Entertainment Weekly had it even more wrong, with Obama saying, "That was like the Special Olympics or something." And so on.

The White House didn't try to correct the misquotes, undoubtedly because the only thing worse than the joke would have been to tell the press, "Let's spend the next few news cycles discussing the nuances of the president's Special Olympics joke." Better to apologize and let it die.

But it would still be nice to have it reported correctly going forward.

Labels: Barack Obama, Jay Leno, Special Olympics