Obama: Haters don’t know me

Darlene Superville

Chicago Suntimes

Feb 7, 2011 02:35AM

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 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, 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 has never been 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.  ”As for the game, Obama declined to choose between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers.“  Here’s the thing, once my Bears lost, I don’t pick sides,” he said. AP