By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 5, 2008
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News with Senator Barack Obama on Thursday, the first of four segments on “The O’Reilly Factor.” (Fox News)
The topic was national security, and their tone was civil, but thankfully not too civil: Mr. O’Reilly, as is his wont, spoke brusquely, interrupted, argued and didn’t let his guest off the hook. He told Mr. Obama he had “bloviated” in parts of his convention speech, but congratulated him on his early opposition to the war, saying he had been “perspicacious.”
Mr. O’Reilly then demanded that his guest admit that he was wrong to oppose the military surge. Mr. Obama didn’t give in; he repeated previous qualifications but did go farther, and less equivocally, than before in acknowledging that the surge had worked. “It’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” he said. Mr. Obama is known for the subtlety and nuance of his answers; Mr. O’Reilly has no patience for either. And accordingly, they had a bracing exchange, in what was the first of four segments to be spread over four days.
Mr. Obama has talked to Fox News reporters quite a few times since the primaries began: he sat down with Chris Wallace in April. But this was his first appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” and its host has had a prickly relationship with the Obama campaign. Mr. O’Reilly has had to apologize for an unfortunate turn of phrase when discussing Michelle Obama, played videos of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. early and often, and is still underscoring Mr. Obama’s association with William Ayers, a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s (a topic Mr. O’Reilly gleefully said would be debated in Monday’s segment).
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