President Obama sat down with Fox News Show host Bill O’Reilly in a rare and candid interview that touched on everything from the unrest in Egypt and how it should be handled, the economy and how to achieve a more stable union, and Obama’s thoughts on the 2012 elections. But it was Glenn Beck that really brought the two men together in a meeting of the minds.
In hyping the interview, Bill O claimed that this would be the most watched interview of any in the history of mankind due to the fact that it preceded the Super Bowl and, of course, it was a Fox host interviewing President Obama and not Keith Olbermann, who, O’Reilly couldn’t resist adding “is still unemployed as far as I know, seeing as he never took me up on my offer to be my shoeshine boy.”
In reality, however, early leaks that O’Reilly and Obama would be dissing Glenn Beck on national television and coming to a consensus over his waning mental state seems to have been the big draw all along. Word travels fast especially when Bill O is responsible for self-promotion. Little hints were dropped all during the week preceding the interview. If you were lucky, you’d catch little nuggets like “Be sure to watch Sunday before the game when President Obama and I will sit down and discuss, among other things, the state of Glenn Beck’s mind,” making a play on discussion about the state of the union.
Once the interview was complete and O’Reilly was interviewed himself by reporters, he stated “I admit it. I’m a ratings whore. If it weren’t for the discussion about Glenn Beck’s deteriorating grasp of reality, we may have gotten people to tune in, but after about 5 minutes of discussing Egypt and the economy, they’d be switching over to the pre-game shows and not given us a second look.
“Once again,” claims O’Reilly, “I gotta give props to Glenn Beck. He is the real draw here.” And then he added, “Like it or not.”