President Obama said Wednesday that he feels “enormous frustration” with Republicans in Congress and their efforts to block his legislative agenda.
“Sometimes people ask me, ‘Man, how do you stay optimistic because it just seems like a bunch of problems piling up on your desk and it doesn’t seem like you’re getting a lot of help from the other side?'” Obama said at a fundraising event in Boston.
The president said that it’s been a challenging year with the Newtown, Conn. shooting and the Boston marathon bombings.
“We would have hoped that coming out of those two tragedies that we would see a new spirit in Congress of people pulling together and rolling up sleeves and working on the things a broad spectrum of Americans agree on, but that’s not what we got,” he said. “Instead we got more obstruction and more resistance to getting anything done, most recently culminating in a shutdown that was entirely unnecessary.”
Obama was speaking at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where tickets for supporters cost between $16,200 and $64,800.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Newtown is in Massachusetts.
