President Obama & Bill O'Reilly Interview: Who Won the Super Bowl Debate?
Bill O'Reilly interviewed Obama for the third time over Super Bowl weekend, the first interview being back in 2008, which the Washington Post described as "lengthy and affectionate encounter." The second interview was during the 2011 Super Bowl, which "had its share of interruptions, but there was lighthearted banter and the questions were more neutral."
Analysts have broken down the interview like a sports game, noting in the statistics that O'Reilly interrupted the president 42 times (fellow debaters may find his combative interview style that is challenging). O'Reilly spoke about 1,000 of the words in the 2500-word interview. The interview was only 10 minutes long so he had to set the pace in order to get in all his questions.
O'Reilly spent most of the interview time on the Benghazi attacks, Obamacare rollout problems and IRS corruption claims. O'Reilly's biggest score came at the end of the interview, when he read a letter from a California woman asking the president, "Why do you feel it's necessary to fundamentally transform the nation?"
Obama started to say "I don't think we have to fundamentally transform the nation..." before O'Reilly interrupted to say "But these are your words." It turns out before his election in 2008 Obama had said, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America," a transformation which he claimed would end the "politics that would divide a nation."
This shouldn't be a major criticism of Obama, however, as the reality of being president is much more difficult than idealized when running a campaign full of pledges. In reality it's very hard to carry out the sweeping changes that are promised because politics is politics.
Obama criticized the Fox news media, saying that untrue criticisms surface in the public mind "because folks like you are telling them that."
"These kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part because you and your TV station will promote them," the president said.
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