Politics

Jay Leno Asks President Obama Tougher Questions Than the DC Press

What's Obama going to do, cut off the Tonight Show's access?

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For the last few months, Jay Leno's decided President Barack Obama makes for a good joke.

That's a problem for the White House — one that the president came here Tuesday trying to fix

Throughout his career, Leno's demonstrated show business's most accurate sense of what the greatest denominator of people find funny. Leno may make his fellow comedians and the Amtrak corridor groan, but he's spent 20 years on top of the ratings, and is finishing his run at the Tonight Show with them on the rise

Obama and Leno covered a lot of serious ground — about the threat to U.S. embassies, the troubled relationship with Russia over Edward Snowden and the country's anti-gay laws, and the NSA's surveillance activities. And they also covered Obama's relationships with former rivals John McCain and Hillary Clinton, how the president really does like broccoli, and even added the obligatory joke about getting so old that he and his friends needed ibuprofen after they played basketball and golf together on his birthday.