On Tuesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer said that the Obama campaign’s “Big Bird” commercial is so bad that it will actually hurt President Barack Obama in November.
“I hope they run it until the end of time,” Krauthammer said. “This could be the worst ad I’ve ever seen.”
The 30-second spot takes aim at Romney for suggesting during last week’s presidential debate that federal funding for PBS, the network that produces “Sesame Street” and the character Big Bird, should be slashed.
“Mitt Romney: Taking on our enemies, no matter where they nest!” jeers the narrator in the ad, which mocks Romney for worrying about Sesame Street instead of Wall Street.
“I want to make an appeal to people in Chicago: Run this ad every night over and over again,” Krauthammer said. “Spend all of your money and time on this. This is an ad that is trivial. It diminishes the presidency. It assumes, of course, that everybody wants to subsidize a company that, as we just heard from Shannon [Bream], is [one] third of a billion-dollar enterprise.”
The ad is particularly hypocritical given the president’s own track record on reducing spending, according to Krauthammer.
“The biggest driver of our debt, according to Obama himself, is Medicare,” Krauthammer continued. “He’s done nothing on that. … Romney mentioned PBS as the way to say, ‘We’re going to go from the biggest expenditures to the most trivial expenditures, because we have to go after everything when we have a deficit this large.’ … [For] anybody to run an ad that reminds people of the worst debate that any president has ever had, I think, is a big mistake. I hope they run it until the end of time.”
Co-panelist Kirsten Powers agreed with Krauthammer’s assessment, saying that the ad was a new low for the Obama campaign.
“It’s a truly terrible ad,” Powers said. “When you watch it, it’s sort of shocking that they’re doing this, and it suggests a campaign that’s completely out of touch with what’s going on right now, not just because it’s trivial and there are serious things going on, but also because it’s just this out of nowhere messaging. What does Wall Street have to do with anything? That’s not what anybody is talking about. You know, and suddenly now, in trying to suggest that Mitt Romney is somehow like Bernie Madoff? I mean, I have a very low bar in terms of my expectations of politicians. But this is, this is especially low.”