Obama Needs to Talk About Snuffleupagus

Barack Obama is focusing on the wrong Muppet. His campaign's new Big Bird attack ad may have garnered lots of attention, but "Big Bird is not the problem," writes Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. "The problem is Snuffleupagus." Snuffy, if you don't recall, was Big Bird's imaginary friend, and the problem with Mitt Romney's budget isn't what he's said he wants to cut—like subsidies to PBS—it's "the vastly larger amount of unseen cuts he has yet to identify."

Romney wants $5 trillion in spending cuts, but has only named Obamacare and PBS—the latter of which gets him less than half of 1% of the way there. The rest of that imaginary, unseen cut "threatens much more than Muppets and monsters. Human lives are at stake." Republicans are eager, for instance, to investigate security shortfalls in Benghazi, but Romney's plan would surely necessitate cutting State Department funding, and with it embassy security. "Big Bird is a distraction," Milbank concludes. "Obama should be drawing attention to the elephant in the room." (More Dana Milbank stories.)