President Obama says that when he called California Attorney General Kamala Harris

President Obama says that when he called California Attorney General Kamala Harris “by far the best-looking attorney general in the country,” it was a joke intended to be an “innocuous comment,” but he doesn’t blame critics for jumping on him about it.

“Kamala’s a friend of mine. We had been joking off-stage,” Obama told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie in an interview broadcast Wednesday on “Today.”

He said that when he took the stage at the California fundraiser earlier this month, he made the “same joke.”

“Obviously, some people, I think, reacted negatively. Kamala knew where I was coming from,” Obama said. “But I do think that it was a, it was a useful teaching moment for me and for the country. As the father of two daughters, I want to make sure that they’re judged on the merits and not on their appearance.

“And so you know I’ve got no problem in people, I think, using what was intended as an innocuous comment to make this larger point that we want to make sure that women are judged, you know, based on the job they do and not how they look.”

He ended up calling Harris shortly after he made the comments April 4 to apologize.

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