When O’Reilly visited the White House for a Super Bowl interview with Obama last winter, the president, knowing O’Reilly’s interest, brought his guest to the Lincoln Bedroom to show him a copy of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s hand. “I agree with the 70 percent of Americans who like him,” O’Reilly says. “I like him.”

That is not to say he sympathizes with the president. He states flatly that Obama will lose his reelection bid next year, and deservedly so. “I think he tried, but it’s not working,” he says. “And he doesn’t seem to be nimble enough to make that pivot to ‘OK, this didn’t work.’?”

O’Reilly’s liberal critics tend to cast him as the biggest bogeyman of the Fox News–Republican conspiracy, but he insistently disclaims ideology—asserting an independence that, in a relative sense, has some merit. Where Sean Hannity’s positions on a given partisan issue can be reliably predicted (“He has a Republican show,” O’Reilly says, “and Republicans should have a show”), O’Reilly is not strictly doctrinaire except for a slavish adherence to what might be called the Ideology of Bill: a set of certainties derived from his Roman Catholic upbringing in a working-class home in Levittown, on Long Island, where the values of the 1950s and early ’60s were indelibly imprinted upon him. “Truth be told, I liked my country better pre-Vietnam,” he wrote in his memoir. “It was more fun. The Aquarius deal was too confusing.”