President Obama, during a star-studded fundraising dinner at the Tuscan-style villa of actor, playwright and filmmaker Tyler Perry, got caught in an embarrassing Freudian slip before quickly correcting himself.
Speaking about the need to reduce the nation’s incarceration rate for lesser crimes, Obama made a comment suggesting a preoccupation with his dwindling time in the White House, and in later remarks, his legacy.
“We should be reforming our criminal justice system in such a way that we are not incarcerating nonviolent offenders in ways that renders them incapable of getting a job after they leave office,” he said to laughter.
“Little slip of the tongue there … Tyler is going to give me a job once I leave,” he quickly interjected to more chuckles. “I think it was Bill Clinton who said the White House is the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.”
In his second fundraiser of the day, (the first was a roundtable held at the Pacific Palisades home of Chuck Lorre, a creator of “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory”) Obama spoke for roughly 20 minutes to an audience of nearly 250 donors, including actress January Jones, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, former NBA player Jason Collins, real estate developer and former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, and filmmaker and the head of content acquisition for Netflix Ted Sarandos.
Later during the remarks, the president spoke of a letter from a man in Colorado who voted for him twice and was exasperated and felt disillusioned that Obama had not reformed Washington as he promised during his 2008 campaign.
“[A]s mightily as I struggled against that, I told him, ‘you’re right, it’s still broken,” Obama recalled writing back to him.
He then put the onus on the individual to help bring about the changes he wanted to see in the nation’s capital himself.
“But I reminded him that when I ran in 2008, I, in fact, did not say I would fix it — I said we would fix it,” he said.
“I didn’t say yes, I can. I said — what?” Obama questioned the audience, who quickly responded.
“Yes, we can!”
“And so I said to him, if, in fact, you are dissatisfied, then writing a letter to me is nice but I need you,” he said. “If you’re dissatisfied that every few months we have a mass shooting in this country, killing innocent people, then I need you to mobilize and organize a constituency that says this is not normal, and we are going to change it, and put pressure to elect people who insist on that change.”
He went on to talk about trying to enlist help from the rest of the country on racial polarization, increased opportunities for minority children, better early childhood education programs, encouraging college attendance and mentorship, as well as climate change and the environment.
“What I also said was that the most important office in a democracy is the office of citizen,” he concluded. “And that’s true for the president of the United States, but that will be just as true for me when I leave this office. And it’s true for all of you.”
