WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says he doesn’t take it personally when people say they hate him. And the thing he dislikes most about being president is the constant, intense scrutiny.
“The people who dislike you don’t know you. The folks who hate you, they don’t know you,” Obama said Sunday in an interview broadcast during Fox’s pre-game coverage of the widely watched NFL football Super Bowl. “What they hate is whatever funhouse mirror image of you that’s out there. They don’t know you.”
Asked by Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly whether his critics annoyed him, Obama said: “By the time you get here, you have to have had a pretty thick skin. If you didn’t, then you probably wouldn’t have gotten here.”
The 14-minute, live interview sought Obama’s views on a range of timely matters, including the unrest in Egypt and the ultimate fate of the new health care law. O’Reilly also probed Obama on lighter topics, including which team would win the NFL championship game and the worst part of his job.
Obama lamented anew about “being in the bubble.” He is followed practically everywhere by staff, Secret Service agents and the media.
“It’s very hard to escape,” said Obama, seated in the Blue Room of the White House. “Every move you make … and over time, you know, what happens is that you feel like you’re not able to just have a spontaneous conversation with folks. And that’s a loss. That’s a big loss.”
Asked what surprised him after he took office, Obama said it’s that he’s never asked to solve an easy problem.
“I think that the thing you understand intellectually but that you don’t understand in your gut until you’re in the job … is that every decision that comes to my desk is something that nobody else has been able to solve,” he said. “The easy stuff gets solved somewhere by somebody else. By the time it gets to me, you don’t have easy answers.”
Obama said he has to use his best judgment knowing that “you don’t have perfect information and you know that you’re not going to have a perfect solution.”
Obama denied that he’s begun a shift from the left to the political middle following the “shellacking” Democrats suffered in the November elections — the party lost control of the House and has a slimmer majority in the Senate – and as he lays the groundwork for an expected campaign for re-election in 2012.
“I’m the same guy,” Obama said. “And my practical focus, my common-sense focus is how do we out-innovate, out-educate, out-build and out-compete the rest of the world? How do we create jobs here in the United States of America? How do we make sure that businesses are thriving … but how do we also make sure ordinary Americans can live out the American dream because right now they don’t feel like they are?”
O’Reilly asked Obama three times whether the job had changed him before he acknowledged that it had. Obama said his hair is grayer and that “I’m basically the same guy as when I came in” to office. O’Reilly then said that some of Obama’s friends have said Obama is not as light or spontaneous as he once was, to which Obama agreed.
“I would say that’s probably true. There’s no doubt that the weight of this office has an impact,” he said.
Asked about the crisis in Egypt, Obama said the country has been forever changed by the huge pro-democracy protests that began Jan. 25. He also played down prospects that the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned political and religious group in Egypt with strains of anti-U.S. ideology, would take a major role in any new government.
On health care, Obama said a federal judge in Florida who recently struck down the entire law “was wrong.” That judge said the requirement that nearly everyone have health insurance is unconstitutional. A different judge who reached the same conclusion in a separate case voided only that requirement. Judges in two other cases upheld the law.
It’s generally accepted that the U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word. Obama gave an indirect answer to O’Reilly’s question about whether he’s prepared for the law to “go down.” Obama said only that he doesn’t want to spend the next two years “refighting the battles of the last two years.”
The Fox News Channel host, a frequent Obama critic who called him “Robin Hood Obama” in a September 2008 interview during the presidential campaign, opened Sunday’s meeting by thanking Obama and his administration for assisting two Fox reporters who’d gotten “roughed up” in Cairo.
“Those guys could have died and I just want everybody to know the State Department really saved them,” O’Reilly said.
The Obama administration has had a contentious relationship with Fox, with some officials accusing it of operating like a wing of the Republican Party.
But O’Reilly was not quite as combative Sunday.
“I enjoy talking to you,” O’Reilly said in closing. “I disagree with you sometimes. I hope you think I’m fair to you. I try to be, but I wish you well in the next two years.”
As for the football championship game, Obama declined to choose between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.
“Here’s the thing, once my (Chicago) Bears lost, I don’t pick sides,” he said. Green Bay defeated the Bears to get to the Super Bowl.
But he and his wife, Michelle, were throwing a party and Obama, an avid basketball player, said he’d be watching. About 100 people were expected, including celebrities Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, the husband-and-wife part-owners of the Miami Dolphins. Elected officials from Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also invited.
Associated Press
