by ei8htx » Fri Oct 05, 2012 11:18 pm
"No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something." –making an off-hand joke during an appearance on "The Tonight Show", March 19, 2009 (Obama later called the head of the Special Olympics to apologize)
"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the Post Office that's always having problems." –attempting to make the case for government-run healthcare, while simultaneously undercutting his own argument, Portsmouth, N.H., Aug. 11, 2009
"The Cambridge police acted stupidly." —commenting on a white police officer's arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Mass., at a news conference, July 22, 2009. Obama later had to convene a "Beer Summit" at the White House to help tamp down the controversy stirred by his remark
"It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." –speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser about his troubles winning over some small-town, working-class voters, April 11, 2008
"One such translator was an American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world -- Navy Corpse-Man Christian Brossard." –mispronouncing "Corpsman" (the "ps" is silent) during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2010 (The Corpsman's name is also Christopher, not Christian)
"I've now been in 57 states — I think one left to go." —at a campaign event in Beaverton, Oregon, May 9, 2008
"When I meet with world leaders, what's striking -- whether it's in Europe or here in Asia..." -mistakenly referring to Hawaii as Asia while holding a press conference outside Honolulu, Nov. 16, 2011
"We're the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad." —Cincinnati, OH, Sept. 22, 2011
"The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries." --Tampa, Fla., Jan. 28, 2010
"On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong."
"The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, you know, there's a reaction that's been bred in our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society."
"In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died -- an entire town destroyed." --on a Kansas tornado that killed 12 people