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Obamaâ€™s Big Bird Ad Ruffles Feathers

10 October 2012 00:36 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Beloved childrenâ€™s television character Big Bird soared to new heights in American politics Tuesday with the release of a new TV ad by US President Barack Obama accusing Republican challenger Mitt Romney of cracking down on the educational show â€œSesame Streetâ€ rather than on Wall Street, APA reports.

The spot follows Romneyâ€™s vow in last weekâ€™s presidential debate to end federal funding for Sesame Streetâ€™s broadcaster, PBS, which has made the 8-foot-tall Big Bird an icon for generations of children.
â€œBig. Yellow. A menace to our economy. Mitt Romney knows itâ€™s not Wall Street you have to worry about, itâ€™s Sesame Street,â€ the adâ€™s voiceover says ominously.
While the ad has an air of irony and puckishness about it, it sparked serious responses from Romney, fellow Republicans, and from Sesame Street itself.
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind the childrenâ€™s show, said in a statement Tuesday that it does not â€œendorse candidates or participate in political campaigns.â€
â€œWe have approved no campaign ads, and as is our general practice, have requested that the ad be taken down,â€ the organization said in the statement.
Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Tuesday told reporters on the presidentâ€™s plane, Air Force One, that Sesame Workshopâ€™s request was under review.
"It doesn’t change the fact that there’s only one candidate in this race who is going to continue to fight for Big Bird and Elmo, and he’s riding on this plane," CBS News cited Psaki as saying.
"There’s been a strong grassroots outcry over the attacks on Big Bird," she added, CBS News reported. "This is something that mothers across the country are alarmed about, and we’re tapping into that."
Speaking on the campaign trail in the state of Iowa Tuesday, Romney suggested Obama spend more time talking about saving jobs rather than childrenâ€™s shows.
"You have to scratch your head when the president spends the last week talking about saving Big Bird," Romney said.
Unlike the so-called â€œSwift Boatâ€ ads in 2004 questioning Democratic candidate John Kerryâ€™s military record, the Big Bird ad was clearly designed for fun and not to seriously influence voter opinion, said John Geer, author of â€œIn Defense of Negativity: Attack Advertising in Presidential Campaigns.â€
â€œItâ€™s not a nasty ad,â€ said Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. â€œI suspect it will be little more than a short-term kerfuffle.â€
Ironically, the Big Bird ad released Tuesday may even serve to highlight the fact that under the Obama administration, no senior Wall Street executives have faced criminal prosecution for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, former federal financial regulators and securities law experts said.