BY MICHAEL SAUL DAILY NEWS POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT  Friday, September 5th 2008, 1:27 AM  Presidential hopeful Barack Obama faced-off against Fox News' attack dog, Bill O'Reilly.  Barack Obama stuck to his guns that the troop surge in Iraq was a mistake - yet acknowledged it succeeded "beyond our wildest dreams" - during a contentious interview with Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly.  "There's no doubt that the violence is down," Obama said. "The surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated - by the way, including President Bush and the other supporters."  When pressed again by O'Reilly to admit he erred, Obama replied, "No, no, no, no."  "Hold on a second," Obama chided the conservative pit bull.  "If you look at the debate that was taking place, we had gone through five years of mismanagement of this war that was disastrous," he said, "and the President wanted to double-down and continue on an open-ended policy that did not create the kinds of pressure on the Iraqis to take responsibility."  When pressed yet again, Obama said the surge succeeded "beyond our wildest dreams," but insisted a broader Iraq aim remains unmet - there's still no political reconciliation.  The faceoff aired shortly before John McCain portrayed himself as more qualified than the Democrat to protect the nation.  Obama also declared he "absolutely" believes the nation is waging a "war on terror."  Asked to identify the United States' enemies, Obama replied, "Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America who have a distorted ideology, who have perverted the faith of Islam, and so we have to go after them."  Obama's appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" comes after months of tense relations between Fox and the Democrat's campaign.  In June, Team Obama erupted in fury after a Fox producer labeled the candidate's wife, Michelle, his "baby mama."  O'Reilly physically shoved an Obama aide in January at an appearance in Nashua, N.H., prompting the Secret Service to intervene and instruct the TV personality to cool it.  The Obama aide said O'Reilly pushed him and called him "low- class."  "I just, um, removed him from in front of the camera," O'Reilly said then. "I might have called him an SOB. ...That's possible. But nothing more than that."
Barack Obama burnished his commander-in-chief credentials in a toe-to-toe interview last night with Fox News Channel attack dog Bill O'Reilly.