By Mark Steyn
Saturday, October 06, 2012
Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney’s debate
coach. As he put it about halfway through “That’s Life”:
“I’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly . . . ”
That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped
right on Big Bird, and then he took off — and never looked back, while the
other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a
certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet
that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to
borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a
terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too
preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm
Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it
indicated a man entirely at ease with himself — in contrast to wossname, the
listless sourpuss staring at his shoes.
Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s
performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street
was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be
made. “WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird
alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for “finally
getting tough on Big Bird” — not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling
twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the
rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out
to a campaign rally, and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without
mishap.
Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary
responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization
of childhood — the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges
of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be
a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to
celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is
not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations
of Americans in that pabulum and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected
diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J.
Scott Gration, the president’s special envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the
most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think
about giving out cookies. Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley
faces, handshakes . . . ” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched
machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t
given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert &
Ernie and Barack & Hillary . . . well, actually I am.
Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So
let’s go back to his central thrust. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
receives nearly half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it
disburses to PBS stations, who in turn disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer.
I don’t know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Senator Jim DeMint, the
president of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of
$956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Senator Harry Reid embody the same
mystifying phenomenon: They’ve been in “public service” their entire lives and
have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.
Mitt’s decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his
station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counterarguments from
Democrats: (1) Half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great
sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? (2) Everybody loves Sesame
Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point,
whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every
American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it’s sold nigh on
a billion bucks’ worth of merchandising sales (that’s popular toys such as the
Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then
nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.
Conversely, if this supposed “public” broadcasting brand
is capable of standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS’s
output — the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert,
twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials — whatever
their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should
be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which
a Communist party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by
charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious
economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.
(Full disclosure: Some years ago, I hosted a lavish BBC
special, and, at the meeting intended to sell it to PBS, the executive from
Great Performances said he could only sign off on the deal if I were digitally
edited out and replaced by Angela Lansbury. Murder, he shrieked. Lest I sound
bitter, I should say I am in favor of this as a more general operating
principle for public broadcasting: for example, A Prairie Home Companion would
be greatly improved by having Garrison Keillor digitally replaced by Paul
Ryan.) The small things are not unimportant — and not just because, when
“small” is defined as anything under eleven figures, “small” is a big part of
the problem. If Americans can’t muster the will to make Big Bird leave the
government nest, they certainly will never reform Medicare. Just before the
debate in Denver, in the general backstage mêlée, a commentator pointed out
Valerie Jarrett, who is officially “assistant to the president for public
engagement and intergovernmental affairs,” a vital position which certainly
stimulates the luxury-length business-card industry. Not one in 100,000
Americans knows what she looks like, but she declines to take the risk of
passing among the rude peasantry without the protection of a Secret Service
detail. Leon Panetta, the defense secretary, has a private jet to fly him home
from Washington every weekend.
The queen of the Netherlands flies commercial, so does
the queen of Denmark. Prince William and his lovely bride, whom at least as
many people want to get a piece of as Valerie Jarrett or Leon Panetta, flew to
Los Angeles on a Royal Canadian Air Force boneshaker. It is profoundly unrepublican
when minor public officials assume that private planes and entourages to hold
the masses at bay are a standard perk of office. And it is even more disturbing
that tens of millions of Americans are accepting of this. The entitlements are
complicated, and will take some years and much negotiation. But, in a Romney
administration, rolling back the nickel’n’dime stuff — i.e., the
million’n’billion stuff — should start on Day One.
Mitt made much of his bipartisan credentials in Denver.
So, in that reach-across-the-aisle spirit, if we cannot abolish entirely
frivolous spending, might we not at least attempt some economies of scale?
Could Elmo, Grover, Oscar, and Cookie Monster not be redeployed as
Intergovernmental Engagement Assistant Jarrett’s security detail? Could Leon
Panetta not fly home on Big Bird every weekend?
And for the next debate, instead of a candidate slumped
at the lectern like a muppet whose puppeteer has gone out for a smoke, maybe
Elmo’s guy could shove his arm up the back of the presidential suit.
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