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Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on a daytime talk show today when the pre-recorded interview with the ladies from The View aired. He has been on the show two previous times, but they were before he was elected. To make the interview more interesting, Barbara Walters came back for the first time since she had heart valve surgery earlier this year. She wasn’t the only one with hard-hitting questions, making the interview quite interesting.
Obama On Current Issues
Barbara Walters started off by asking Barack Obama to describe what his current “roses and thorns” were, an evening game that he and Michelle play with their daughters. When he described his current rose, he talked about a recent trip to Maine with his family. When asked about his thorns, he mentioned everything he has had to deal with since becoming president -- the economy, the oil spill, two wars, a pandemic and a whole host of other issues.
Walters pressed him further, to pick just one thorn. Obama said that the media picks what they want to be the big-ticket issue of any given time. But ...
I have to sign letters to parents of children who have been killed in Afghanistan or the husbands and wives of people who have been killed in battle. And that gives you a sense of perspective that is just different from what is going on on cable TV on any given day.
Perspective indeed.
On a Nation Divided
Elizabeth Hasselbeck then brought some hard-hitting questions about his campaign of hope and how we now find ourselves a nation that is very divided. Obama acknowledged that in the immediate aftermath of the election, the nation was filled with hope and unity. But we also had no idea how bad the economy would get.
As a consequence, the politics of the economic recovery, the steps we had to take to make sure that the banking system didn’t collapse, what we had to do for the auto industry so that didn’t collapse -- a lot of those became controversial. Unfortunately we live in a time when a lot of times people are thinking of the next election instead of the next generation. My hope is that I have tried to set a tone in the debate that says we can disagree without being disagreeable.
On Racism in America
Not ones to let the questions get too easy, too quickly, the ladies of The View then began a series of questions about the Shirley Sherrod case. The questions boiled down to one: “Do you think America is still racist?”
We are Americans. We share common hopes, we share common dreams, we share common aspirations, we are going through common struggles. I mean the fact of the matter is that everybody here is connected in some fashion. And our success and our children’s success is tied up together. I think most Americans feel that way.
But what is still true is that there is still a reptilian side of our brain. That part of our brain that if someone looks different or sounds different that there’s a part of us that is cautious. And what we have to do is fight against that, and that’s part of what Shirley Sherrod was trying to say in the speech if you actually read the whole speech. She was acknowledging, “I have my own biases based on my own experiences, but if I am able to look inward and reflect, I am able to get beyond my biases.” And that’s an exercise that all of us have to undergo day in, day out. It’s a constant struggle. There’s nobody in America that doesn’t have to at some point think about their own racial attitudes.
Expanding on that line of questions, Walters then asked President Obama why he didn’t call himself a black president. After making a joke about having written a whole book on the subject, he began to talk about his experience with racial identity.
Part of what I realized, if the world saw me as African American, then that wasn’t something I needed to run away from; that’s something I
