Before the Super Bowl, President Obama sat down with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly for a widely anticipated interview.

Since it was announced over a month ago, pundits on both sides wondered what the confrontation between the cool-headed president and the temperamental host would look like.

O’Reilly is well known for shouting down guests on his show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” telling those who disagree with him to shut up and cutting the mics of those who bring out the temper-tantrum-throwing 10-year-old boy that lurks just below the surface.

O’Reilly also takes any opportunity to distinguish “real Americans,” conservative Christians who live in states that don’t touch large bodies of water, from liberal elites who just happen to be in America. And he doesn’t leave it up to the viewers, which camp he believes the president to be in.

So how would the interview go? Obama has done several interviews with Fox News, despite the biased attacks the network levies at the president on a daily basis.

But why would he choose to sit down with Bill the bigoted bully? What good could come from an interview with a man who makes his living hurling insults at Obama?

For the past two years, Obama has given pre-game interviews with the network airing the big game. He sat down with CBS’s Katie Couric last year and NBC’s Matt Lauer the year before. Fox aired the Super Bowl this year and chose O’Reilly to do the interview.

It’s hard to say, watching the interview, that Obama much enjoyed his Sunday evening chat with O’Reilly.

But watching the president trying to have a grown-up conversation with a guy who was intent on trapping him into saying something un-American was by far the best of the pre-game entertainment.

O’Reilly resisted the temptation to ask the commander-in-chief what about his Communist background made him hate American grandmothers, opting instead to make his first few questions about Egypt.

To his credit, O’Reilly thanked the president for helping secure the release of two Fox journalists who were assaulted and detained by pro-government forces in Egypt.

It was obvious early on; however, that Reilly had no intentions to let the president finish a thought, much less a sentence.

Still, Obama held his own.

When O’Reilly asked him to pick a winner for the Super Bowl, Obama responded, “Once my Bears lost, I don’t pick sides.”

Sensing an opportunity to reveal Obama’s distaste for the great American sport, O’Reilly said, “So, you don’t care?”

O’Reilly spent a lot of the 14-minute interview interrupting Obama and trying to put words in his mouth.

O’Reilly’s constant interruptions would have seemed rude and amateurish no matter who the subject was. And it is the job of a journalist-if we could be so kind to O’Reilly by calling him that-to press the president for answers at every opportunity.

But to have 15 minutes to ask questions to the leader of the free world, it’s probably wise to let him respond once in awhile.

In the end, both men walked away having gained something. For Obama, he got 15 minutes of airtime in front of the largest television audience of the year. He entered the arena with with one of his most vocal critics and emerged unscathed.

For O’Reilly, half of the country got to watch him try really, really hard to practice grown-up talk.

Dave Balson is a junior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-7942 or