5 Feet of Fury

Nice one by Michael Barone

And by “nice” I mean “nasty”. And by “nasty” I mean “awesome”:

When a politician is in trouble, he usually falls back on what he knows best — the world he saw around him when he entered into political awareness as a young adult. (…)

At least that’s the best explanation I can come up with for the Obama campaign’s obsession with Big Bird.

On the campaign trail in the week after the presidential debate, Obama mentioned Big Bird 13 times — 13 times more than he mentioned Libya.

The Big Bird offensive would have been more effective in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Obama came of political age.

Lots of people then saw public broadcasting as a needed alternative to commercial television.

Better your kids watch “Sesame Street” than cartoons interlaced with ads for sugared cereals.

And they’d learn to respect ghetto kids in the process.

…for ordinary voters, with 133 cable channels to choose from, “Sesame Street” and PBS are just not a big deal.