When former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee first discovered that the Obama campaign had resorted to invoking Big Bird against Republican rival Mitt Romney, he thought it was a joke.
“I did not believe and think when I first heard it that it was a serious political ad put out by the Obama campaign,” he tells Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “I thought it was a comedy sketch that was being put out to sort of spoof the whole controversy over Big Bird.”
Hoping to refocus voter attention away from the president’s lackluster debate performance, the Obama campaign released a new ad in recent days that mocks Romney for "finally getting tough on Big Bird."
The ad was in response to Romney's debate promise to stop subsidizing PBS, which he clarified by saying, "I like PBS. I love Big Bird . . . " adding that he would not, "keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it."
Huckabee noted that even liberal commentators like Chris Matthews and Kirstin Powers were aghast by the ad, which was protested by Sesame Workshop.
“When all they’ve got is to try to sell the country that Big Bird isn’t going to survive without a government subsidy — despite the fact that it gets $400 million from the federal government and the Sesame workshop itself makes over $139 million a year — if that’s all they have, then we can go ahead and tell Mitt to get the moving van ready to load up some furniture and head to 1600 Pennsylvania for January,” Huckabee asserted.
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