President Obama attended a couple of star-studded fundraisers in Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he lamented that governing is a lot harder than campaigning, Politico reports.
Mentioning former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's quip that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, Obama said he's written more of the latter than the former in his first three years in office. "We've been slogging through prose for the last three years," he said. "People, they like the poetry."
At the Holmsby Hills home of Bradley Bell, the executive producer of "The Bold and the Beautiful," and his wife Colleen, Obama said he still has plenty of campaign promises from his 2008 bid left to fulfill—including ending the war in Afghanistan and closing the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – and understands the frustration that some of his supporters have. "I feel the same way sometimes," he said. …
The remarks came at his second fundraiser of the night, a dinner attended by about 80 donors giving the $35,800 maximum to the Obama Victory Fund, which supports the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Actor Jim Belushi, as was Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – who was announced Wednesday as the chairman of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte—and Charlotte mayor Anthony Foxx.