executemany() very slow compared to MySQLdb

I'm trying out oursql because of a bug in MySQLdb which throws an error when mysql functions (now(), utc_timestamp(), etc.) are used within a call to executemany. There is a noticeable slowdown from what I have experienced using MySQLdb when doing an executemany to insert rows. For instance, MySQLdb is able to insert about 1.7 million rows in less than a minute, while the same insert has been running in oursql and is still going after 7 mins or so, with only 60,000 rows inserted. The load average is also a little over 2 on the same hardware that I'm testing my insert with MySQLdb and the load average barely gets to 1.0 when running the same insert using MySQLdb instead of oursql.

Is there something I am doing wrong? The database does not use unicode so I have used both use_unicode=False and charset=None in my call to oursql.connect().