Just before the elections, french-speaking Canadian comedians made a prank call to Sarah Palin. She made real right fool of herself and told the pranksters that she could be president “maybe in eight years”.

So, yesterday when Ileana Ros-Lehtinen picked up her phone and a man sounding like Barack Obama greeted her, she assumed it was a hoax call and hung up. But it wasn’t a prank! The president-elect wanted to speak to the Republican representative of the congress and congratulate her on her re-election.

“I thought it was one of the radio stations in South Florida playing an incredible, elaborate, terrific prank on me,” Ros-Lehtinen told the Miami Herald. “They got Fidel Castro to go along. They’ve gotten Hugo Chavez and others to fall for their tricks. I said, ‘Oh, no, I won’t be punked.”‘

AP reports that Obama wanted to congratulate her on her re-election and said he was looking forward to working with her as the ranking Republican member of the House Foreign Affairs committee. When she did finally talk to him (on the third attempt) she said he laughed a lot! Here’s more from AP:

The conversation lasted about a minute when she cut Obama off, telling him she wasn’t falling for the hoax and that he was a better impersonator than the guy on the satirical TV show Saturday Night Live, she said.

Then Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, called the congresswoman to tell her it wasn’t a joke. But she hung up on him, too. It took a call from Rep. Howard Berman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, to persuade Ros-Lehtinen that Obama really did want to talk to her.When the two finally talked, Ros-Lehtinen said she and Obama had a good conversation and she congratulated him for his victory despite how hard she campaigned for his opponent, Sen. John McCain. He didn’t even blame her for mistaking him for a radio-station prank, she said.

“He laughed a lot, saying in Chicago they do it all the time,” Ros-Lehtinen said. “He said, ‘I don’t blame you for being skeptical.”‘

Here is the prank again if you missed it:

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