Jon Stewart Pokes Fun at Obama PR Trip

Jon Stewart on Wednesday mocked President Barack Obama’s seven-hour plane trip to Puerto Rico, where he spent just four hours. He joked that he went to escape the infamous traffic during New York City’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Stewart aired a clip on “The Daily Show” that showed the president awkwardly checking his notes while uttering Spanish phrases. Between each word of the dish “arroz con gandules,” or rice with pigeon peas, Obama had to glance down at the podium.

The president won cheers from the crowd when he referred to Puerto Rican people by the Spanish “boricuas,” and when he correctly rolled his R’s the first time he pronounced the name of the country. But as Stewart’s video montage showed, the correct pronunciation gradually broke down each time he uttered it.

The Obama White House erroneously claimed that the president’s Tuesday trip to Puerto Rico was the first “official” presidential visit there since John F. Kennedy’s trip in 1961.

Richard Grenell, former spokesman for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, noted that two other presidents visited Puerto Rico since JFK, Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and Gerald Ford in 1976.