LOS ANGELES, Calif. — On Tuesday night, comedian Jon Lovitz stood in the green room at the CNN studios here, warming up for his imminent appearance on Piers Morgan Tonight. Lovitz was there to discuss an anti-Obama rant that had gained national attention—in part, for it’s profanity and in part for expressing aloud a sentiment that many in Hollywood had been privately sharing, in one way or another, for the past year.
The Obama presidency had been a flop.
Lovitz talked about his personal disappointment: he’d voted for the guy, and wondered if he was going to vote for him again. He bashed what he saw as presidential hypocrisy: How was Obama going to slam millionaires then go to a fundraiser at George Clooney’s home and pickup 6 million from those same millionaires?
Lovitz’s friends had warned him to dial it back, worried that trashing a Democratic president could hurt his career. But Obama’s popularity had tanked so far down among the glitterati, he was unconcerned. “He is a fucking asshole,” Lovitz told me, before heading onto the CNN set for his interview.
Though Lovitz is on the conservative end of California liberal, complaints about Obama had become a feature of the L.A. landscape. Over the past week, I’d spoken to more than a dozen Hollywood players, and all had a litany of criticisms. “I’ll write the check,” one top producer, whose films have made over a billion at the box office, told me. “But I’m not going to bother voting for him.” Another studio exec—in a land where the hard driven deal is cultural requirement —wondered if the president’s penchant for compromise meant he had, in the parlance of our times, “no balls.”
