A confident Barack Obama raised an extraordinary $7.8 million Sunday at three California fundraisers, most if it in large checks to a Democratic Party committee. “I will win. Don’t worry about that,” he said to the crowd of about 1,300 at his third event of the evening, according to the pool report.
He was warmly received by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called him "a leader that God has blessed us with at this time."
Obama echoed some of the themes he discussed when he described Pennsylvanians as "bitter" and stoked controversy three months ago, but did so much more adroitly.
"Now, you want to win. And saying it doesn’t make it so," he told the crowd. "It would be nice to think that after eight years of economic disaster, after eight years of bungled foreign policy, of being engaged in a war that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged, that cost us a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, that people would say, let’s toss the bums out. Toss the bums out, we’re starting from scratch, we’re starting over. This is not working."
“So I understand why a lot of folks are saying, this should just happen. Why are we having to run all these television commercials? Why do we have to raise all this money? Just read the papers. These are the knuckleheads who have been in charge. Throw ‘em out. But American politics aren’t that simple," he said.
"The fact of the matter is, at a certain point, when government has not been serving the people for this long, people get cynical. They tune out. And they start saying to themselves, a plague on both your houses. They are willing to consume negative information more frequently than positive information, for good reason. They’ve seen how promises haven’t been kept," he said.