Christmas In The Tank: Steve Harvey Says There Are Relentless Obama Critics, and 'Those Of Us Who Get It'

With President Obama's approval rating in the dumps, it's time for softball interviews. We've seen the usual Barbara Walters holiday spit-and-polish. Then Obama sat down with black talk show host/game show host Steve Harvey. You can see why Obama would pick this opportunity to remind people how unbelievably likeable and down-to-earth he is. The show is syndicated nationally by NBC Universal.

In an interview with WRC-TV in Washington, Harvey insisted his interview (airing Friday) left out the politics. "I don’t care about the politics. It’s not important to me. Look, he’s a great guy. There’s a section of people who don’t agree with anything he does, and then there’s those of us who get it. So I don’t have to go into that again." Harvey then went on to defend both Obamas over the "selfie" in South Africa:

"I thought it was perfectly fine," Harvey told WRC's Pat Lawson Muse. "So what? It was a celebration of life...People want to be seen with the president."

He felt the same way about Michelle Obama's expression in the picture. "You took a photo of this woman who could have been thinking about Mandela’s life, you know, a gnat could have went wide, anything could have happened. They want to take this and make her out to be this – I've met her. I don't know a sweeter person. My wife has met her. I don’t know a sweeter person."

Harvey was thrilled to get the interview, and was suitably humble about how great Obama was: "Just a little boy from Welch, West Virginia, talking to a President of the United States."

He seemed more interested in making Obama smile than pressing for information. "The greatest moment in that interview for me was he was talking about his grandmother, who he misses so. She passed in her eighties and my mom passed in her eighties. And I said to the president, 'I heard a rumor that your mother and my mother had met, and they are on the front row watching us right now.' And that was a pretty cool moment between me and the president, and it kinda meant something to him, so I felt pretty good about that."

So if you want to hear them discuss daughters and dating, set the DVR. "He has developed some theories about dating," Harvey told Muse. "I was pretty proud of my president on that one right there."        

Let's guess they didn't discuss the wonders of subsidized contraceptives under Obamacare.