Well, if you watch the entire video of the interview Obama did with the Reno paper, or if you use you mouse to advance to the 20 minute mark, you'll hear him say; "The Republican approach... I think it has played itself out. I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there, over the last ten to fifteen years. In the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies, when they're being debated among the Presidential candidates and it's all tax cuts. Well, you know, wwe've done that, we tried it. It's not really going to solve our energy policies, for example..."

Sure, I'm sure he was just thinking out loud and he never actually said that he liked the Republican ideas, but the dude did say it.