DETROIT —Not again.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer bristled during the 2018 campaign when her Republican opponent, former state Attorney General Bill Schuette, called her "Jennifer," in an apparent slip of the tongue.
"Learn my name," Whitmer told Schuette, who apparently was thinking of Michigan's first female governor, Jennifer Granholm, who is also a Democrat but looks nothing like Whitmer.
On Wednesday, it happened again. But this time, the slip-up was by Democratic President Joe Biden, who included Whitmer on his short list of potential running mates in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.
"Thank you, Jennifer, for what you've done," Biden told Whitmer, after she thanked Biden for his leadership in winning U.S. Senate passage of a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill she said will help her fulfill her 2018 pledge to "fix the damn roads." If approved by the U.S. House, the bill would send $7.3 billion to Michigan for highway repairs and more than $500 million for bridge work over the next five years, among other investments.
Granholm is now Biden's energy secretary.
The slip-up happened during a virtual event hosted by the White House related to the infrastructure package.
Biden had called Whitmer "Gretchen" earlier in the program.
That might be part of the problem, one commentator suggested.
"He should be calling her 'governor' as an honorific, not by her first name," tweeted Micheline Maynard, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
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