President Barack Obama sits down with Bill Maher on the eve of the election to discuss the issues Real Time viewers care about.
As The Washington Post reports, Bill Maher has been trying to convince President Barack Obama to appear on his show since January of this year.
In January, less than a week before his 60th birthday, Bill Maher made an impassioned plea on his HBO talk show “Real Time With Bill Maher.” He wanted the audience to help him fulfill a long-standing wish. “Before he leaves office I want to get President Obama on this show,” said Maher, who famously donated $1 million to Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
[…]
Maher even posted an online petition, and by late February, the petition had gotten more than 320,000 signatures. The White House said it would “keep in mind Bill’s open invitation for a presidential appearance and give it the respectful consideration that Bill and his large audience deserve.”
Maher finally got his wish and interviewed Pres. Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on November 1st, with HBO announcing last week that the interview would air during the November 4th episode.
As Deadline reports, “Obama reflected on his upcoming exit (‘It is time,’ he said, before adding, ‘I think I’m as good a president now as I’ve ever been’), health care (‘If I was designing a system from scratch, I would probably have looked at a single-payer system’) and even GMOs (‘We need to follow the science’).”
Predictably, the topic turned to the upcoming presidential election, Deadline continued:
The topic naturally and predictably turned to the election battle between Trump and Hillary Clinton, and on a night when Maher all but ditched comedy in favor of anger and even outright fear, Obama ended the interview with a direct plea: “The stakes are high. The choice in this election should be really clear,” the president said before running through a list of the issues his administration has addressed, from climate change, health insurance, Wall Street excess and immigration reform. “Every single issue we’ve made progress on in the last eight years is going to be on the ballot.”
“Anyone who sits on the sidelines or makes a protest vote is a vote for Trump,” Obama said, “and that would be badly damaging to this country, and damaging for the world.”
You can watch the full interview, below:
You must be logged in to post a comment Login