President Barack Obama, in his final appearance as president with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show,” said Tuesday that while he’s proud of his record in the White House, there’s still “a bunch of other things we want to get done” in his last year and a half in office.
After 6½ years as president, he’s starting to feel as though “I finally know what I’m doing,” Obama said in the interview, which was taped Tuesday afternoon and airs at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central.
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“I can’t believe you’re leaving before me,” Obama told Stewart, who’s leaving the satirical news show Aug. 6. “In fact, I’m issuing a new executive order that Jon Stewart cannot leave the show.”
Unfortunately, he joked, it’s already “being challenged in the courts.”
True to form, Stewart pressed the president on several issues, particularly the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran and the scandal over long waiting lists for veterans to get care at VA medical facilities.
Obama said the Iran deal, which the U.N. Security Council endorsed Monday, illustrated how important work goes on behind the scenes in contradiction of critics who complain that a president is accomplishing little.
“I do think the work we did early starts bearing fruit later,” he said. “It just so happens that people are seeing the work we did when we first came in — Iran, for example, [it] took four or five years to get them to to table.”
M. Johnson








