US Republicans applaud ‘Obama’
NEW ORLEANS—”President Barack Obama” — an imitator — won cheers and laughter Saturday at a major gathering of Republican activists with an often off-color routine making fun of Obama and other major politicians.
In a packed hotel ballroom, the actor joked about Obama’s mixed-race parentage, and imagined him and First Lady Michelle Obama, aged by White House pressures, using the room’s giant televisions to show a photograph of African-American television sitcom junk dealer “Fred Sanford” and his wife.
He also showed risque photographs at the core of the “sexting” scandal that cost Democrat Anthony Weiner his House of Representatives seat — including one of him clad in a towel and another that was a close-up of his underwear.
The comic noted that Obama’s father was from Kenya and his mother was a white woman from Kansas and said “my mother loved a black man, and no she was not a Kardashian” — a reference to a popular reality show family.
The actor also joked that he was dropping the “Yes We Can” slogan of his historic 2008 presidential run and embracing a new one, “I killed Osama,” as the big screen television showed a portrait of him in a Superman-style pose.
The actor, whose first appearance pulled the cheering and laughing crowd to its feet, ran through a litany of jokes poking fun at the president and his policies as well as debunked claims that he was not a natural-born US citizen.
“Obama,” preceded on stage by fake US Secret Service agents, quipped that he had recently vacationed “in the state of my birth, Hawaii — or as the Tea Partiers still call it, Kenya.”
He asked the crowd to change the crowded ballroom to “the pre-1967 seat arrangement” — a joke about Obama’s recent call for Israel to adopt pre-1967 borders, which has drawn heavy fire from US conservatives.
The actor talked about Obama’s dog Bo and said that the presidential mansion had a dog house, adding “from what I’m told Bill Clinton slept in it a lot” — a play on a slang term referring to husbands in trouble with their wives.
