President Barack Obama used his appearance at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser held in New York on Monday to poke fun at Republicans in general and the GOP's White House hopefuls vying to succeed him.

"Candidates tough talk about Putin. They say, 'When I talk to Putin, he's going to straighten out,'" Obama noted about some of the foreign policy assertions made by members of the GOP field, Politico reported.

But those kinds of promises are not credible if Republicans cannot even handle tough questions at a television debate, Obama quipped in an apparent reference to the criticism the Republican National Committee had level against Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick and John Harwood, who had hosted the last encounter.

"It turns out they can't handle a bunch of CNBC moderators," the president said. "If you can't handle those guys, I don't think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you."

Obama appeared at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Broadway, where contributors had first been treated to a performance of the hit musical "Hamilton" about founding father Alexander Hamilton, CBS News reported. The president said he was disappointed that he did not arrive in time for the show, especially because appreciation for the production "happens to be the only thing that I think Dick Cheney and I agree on."

"You know when you've brought Barack Obama and Dick Cheney together, that you've accomplished something," Obama said. "That is a cultural landmark."

Finally, the president poked fun at Republicans' assertions that his administration is to blame for many of the problems faced by the United States today, according to CNN.

"According to them everything was really good in 2008. When we were going through the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes, unemployment and uninsured rates were up, we were hopelessly addicted to foreign oil and [Osama] bin Laden was still on the loose," he said. "This apparently was the Golden Age that I messed up."