Poor Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The senior Republican Congresswoman from Florida (Miami!) received a call from President-elect Barack Obama yesterday and hung up on him. Twice!
Ros-Lehtinen thought it was a prank call. She told Barack on the phone the first time, “I’m sorry. But I think this is a joke.”
Obama then told what happened to his Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, who then called Ileana and said, “Ileana, I cannot believe that you hung up on the President-elect.”
So what did she do? She hung up on him as well!
As for her reasoning behind the phone hang-ups she said, “I thought it was one of the radio stations in South Florida playing an incredible, elaborate, terrific prank on me. They got Fidel Castro to go along. They’ve gotten Hugo Chavez and others to fall for their tricks. I said, ‘Oh, no, I won’t be punked.'”
Listen, we have nothing against Ros-Lehtinen, but seriously, she thinks she’s as big as Castro, Hugo, or even Sarah Palin?
As for Obama, he was simply calling Ileana to congratulate her on her re-election and to mention he was looking forward to working with her as the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs committee. It wasn’t until after the third call which came from Howard Berman, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, that she believed the calls were real.
So reazling the mistake, she had her office release a statement explaining the misunderstanding. Unfortunately for her, the press release contained some mispellings. Such as Obama spelled “Barak Obama” and Rahm spelled “Rahm Emmanuel.”
After finally talking to Obama, she said the conversation went well and added that “He laughed a lot, saying in Chicago they do it all the time. He said, ‘I don’t blame you for being skeptical.'”
[Image via AP Images.]