14 DAY TRIAL // At the White House Correspondents Association, CNN’s Ed Henry reportedly convinced Michelle Obama to send her first Tweet from his iPhone. However, it took a while for the first lady to get her message out, particularly because she didn’t know how to type using the phone’s virtual keyboard. “How do you type on this?” she asked, and reportedly handed the phone back to Henry.
“It was my first chance to spend some quality time at dinner with First Lady Michelle Obama, so I decided to do what my pal Ali Velshi would probably do in the same situation: get her hooked on Twitter,” Henry begins the story. “I handed the first lady my iPhone, but it quickly became apparent that she had very little experiences with this smartphone,” he writes.
“Like many people, she said, ‘How do you type on this?’” “Gibbs, who was looking over our shoulders, suggested that I type it out, so I told Mrs. Obama to start dictating the note. I started my typing ‘from flotus,’ as in ‘first lady of the United States’.”
Mrs. Obama then reportedly asked for an opinion on what she had dictated. Gibbs told the first lady that, “The proper way to say it was that it was her first tweet. Mrs. Obama grilled me on whether Gibbs was right, and I said he was but I didn't want to be the one changing her words, so she politely asked me to change it so that she sounded as hip as possible,” Henry informs.
“The final version, for the history books: ‘from flotus: 'here at dinner this is officially my first Tweet. i [sic] am looking forward to some good laughs from the potus and jay’.”
The picture available above, courtesy of CNN’s Erica Dimler, depicts Ed Henry helping first lady Michelle Obama send out her first tweet, alongside renowned comedian Jay Leno, and Robert Gibbs, an American political consultant and the current White House Press Secretary.