DOROTHY RABINOWITZ: OBAMA’S BIG BIRD CAMPAIGN
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It’s not flying. That’s been clear in a week of on-the-stump harangues by the president over Mitt Romney’s announced intention to cut funding to PBS programs including, yes, the beloved Big Bird—a charge the president has been making with evident assurance that he’s delivering a telling blow. One that adds another dark layer to the Obama campaign’s favored image of Mitt Romney—the brutal cost cutter, the tycoon callously indifferent to the needs of good hard-working Americans. All that might enhance their lives—their children’s lives—he wants to take away.
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Columnist Kim Strassel on President Obama invoking Big Bird on the stump. Photos: Associated Press
There has been something strange this week, something clatteringly off key, about President Obama’s delivery of the theme. Such speech-making might have done for a day, once Mr. Obama returned to the campaign trail after his disastrous debate showing. But a full week focus on Big Bird has only succeeded in emphasizing the depths of Team Obama’s desperation over the debate outcome, those polls. Then came the truly remarkable spectacle of the ad that hit the TV screens yesterday—the one starring Big Bird in what was, ostensibly, an effort at wit. It was meant as satire, those joshing light-hearted barbs aimed at Mr. Romney’s war on Big Bird.
But there is, as everyone knows, nothing as impossible to fake as a light-hearted tone. The ad wasn’t merely a piece of heavy-handed mockery gone wildly wrong—it’s effect was that of a sign in blazing neon that this was a campaign in deep distress.
It also provided Gov. Romney with an opportunity to deliver the same sort of perfectly targeted response he showed in that debate. Here were Americans across the nation in desperate economic circumstance, Americans in need of jobs—it seemed very odd to him, he told audiences, that the president had spent all week on the subject of Big Bird. It was obvious, in the response from the crowds, that Gov. Romney’s point, his quick sure tone, had struck home.
The revelations that emerged from last week’s debate, and the public reactions thereto, have inevitably brought the election race to a new stage—one in which Mitt Romney’s political ear is unfailingly well tuned, while his opponent’s appears to be increasingly impaired. A working political instinct would have told Mr. Obama that his steady focus on Big Bird looked like the frantic exercise it was. Moreover, that what happened to Big Bird wasn’t the kind of worry keeping Americans up at night.
Team Obama will evidently have a job recovering the confidence shattered by that debate showing, and by the even more ominous indicators that have emerged about the strength of Mr. Obama’s support.
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