US News

Obama doesn’t worry about those who hate him; Says ‘no going back’ for Egypt

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 interviewer 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 Super Bowl 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 once 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.”

A liberal, Obama denied that he’s begun a shift to the political middle following the “shellacking” Democrats suffered in the November elections — the party lost control of the House and now has a slimmer majority in the Senate — and as he positions himself to run for re-election in 2012.

“I’m the same guy,” Obama said.

The president also repeated statements that Egypt is not going to go back to the way it was before pro-democracy protests roiled the country, and played down prospects that the Muslim Brotherhood would take a major role in a new government.

“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt,” Obama said. “They don’t have majority support.”

Even so, Obama said the Brotherhood, a banned political and religious group in Egypt, is well-organized and that he hoped to see a representative government emerge in the country.

Obama would not be drawn into predicting whether Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would step down.

“Only he knows what he’s going to do,” Obama said.

“The U.S. can’t forcefully dictate, but what we can do is say the time is now for you to start making a change in your country,” the president said. “Mubarak has already decided he’s not going to run again.”

Nearly two weeks into the Egyptian crisis, the Obama administration is still struggling to find a path forward that protects U.S. security interests without abandoning the pro-democracy protesters.