How Obama lost Hollywood

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.”

A number of other actors and producers lamented how they’d gone so far as to donate and volunteer for Obama in 2008—and now, disgusted, they were planning on doing neither this time around. They had bought what Obama was selling four years—about the wars, about Gitmo, about changing things in Washington, about the hope and the change—and Obama had let them down. Even Matt Damon—one of the president’s most stalwart celebrity supporters—famously said last year he was disappointed.

“Starry-eyed, thinking Obama was going to change the world, post-racial America, all of that—it was here in Hollywood, more so than anywhere else in the country,” says an influential Democratic party insider and fundraiser in LA.