I don’t know, maybe they didn’t play Aretha in Indonesian schools where he learned to love the beautiful sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Maybe when he went to live with Grandma & Grandpa in Hawaii, he didn’t listen to Aretha, and by the time he got to high school he was all choom-ganged out to have been repeating the spelling.
Just because most 50 year olds in America can spell respect because of Aretha’s song, doesn’t mean that Obama can. He isn’t like most of us. He’s barely American, and what part of us he is, is the part that hates what America is and was founded on.