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WASHINGTON — President Obama quickly apologized for his quip on “The Tonight Show” on NBC on March 19 comparing his modest bowling skills to those of athletes who have disabilities.
Chatting with the host, Jay Leno, the president said he had been practicing at the White House bowling alley and rolled a 129. “It was like the Special Olympics or something,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Obama and his aides recognized the slip at once and moved to minimize the damage. Mr. Obama called the chairman of the Special Olympics, Tim Shriver, from Air Force One on his way back to Washington on Thursday before the taped interview with Mr. Leno was broadcast.
“He apologized in a way I think was very moving,” Mr. Shriver said Friday on “Good Morning America.”
He added that Mr. Obama sounded “very sincere.”
“Words hurt; words do matter,” said Mr. Shriver, son of the Special Olympics’ founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of President John F. Kennedy, and R. Sargent Shriver, who was the first director of the Peace Corps.
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican candidate for vice president in 2008 and the mother of an infant with Down syndrome, said in a statement on Friday, “This was a degrading remark about our world’s most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world.”
Bill Burton, the deputy White House press secretary, said Mr. Obama “in no way intended to disparage the Special Olympics” with his offhand remark.
“He thinks that the Special Olympics are a wonderful program that gives an opportunity to shine to people with disabilities from around the world,” Mr. Burton told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From The New York Times:
