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. He was also asked about the worst part of his job: being followed practically everywhere.
“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.”
