CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) -
President Obama came back home Friday to attend campaign fundraisers in Chicago.
He attended one event in Minneapolis Friday morning, and then headed to Chicago for a speech at the Chicago Cultural Center in front of 350 people. Tickets started at $2,500.
Mr. Obama addressed a bad jobs report that came out on Friday morning, showing the economy had only added 69,000 jobs in May, sending the unemployment rate back up to 8.2 percent.
"We've got more work to do. We are not satisfied. We've still got miles to go on this journey," Obama said.
At the second fundraiser, Mr. Obama addressed a dinner of roughly fifty in the elegant South Loop brownstone of Chicago lawyer Chaka Patterson.
"It's nice to be back on the South Side," he said.
He gave a shout-out to Gov. Pat Quinn, seated in the middle of the room, then launched into the abbreviated version of his stump speech.
Members of the Polish American community planned to gather for a protest in front of the Cultural Center Friday night, but called it off Friday morning.
They wanted the White House to issue an apology for a slip up made by the president, when he referred to the Nazi death camps as "Polish death camps" during a recent ceremony for a Polish WWII hero.
The White House said the president misspoke – intending to say that the death camp operated on German-occupied Polish soil, not that the Polish people were in charge of it. But the protestors said they wanted a stronger response.
President Obama wrote a letter to the Polish president apologizing for the accidental verbal misstep, and the subsequent controversy that ensued in Poland.
"I regret the error," Mr. Obama wrote, "and agree that this moment is an opportunity to ensure that this and future generations know the truth."
"The Polish people suffered terribly under the brutal Nazi occupation during World War II," Mr. Obama wrote. "In pursuit of their goals of destroying the Polish nation and Polish culture and exterminating European Jewry, the Nazis killed some six million Polish citizens, including three million Polish Jews during the Holocaust… The bravery of Poles in the underground resistance is one of history's great stories of heroism and courage."
The Washington Post reported President Bronislaw Komorowski's response:
"The events of the past few days and the U.S. President's reply may, in my opinion, mark a very important moment in the struggle for historical truth."
Following the Cultural Center event, the president will attend two private fundraising dinners, one in the South Loop and the other along the Gold Coast.
