Obama Campaign Won't Let Big Bird Go

Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter apparently isn't quite ready to close up the Obama campaign office on Sesame Street. Today, in a joint interview with Romney surrogate Kevin Madden hosted by Bob Schieffer, Cutter attempted to defend the Obama administration's seemingly myopic focus on smaller and smaller issues, the issue of funding Big Bird among them.

"We are not the one that brought up Big Bird," Cutter said. "Big Bird is important because that's the only thing that Mitt Romney could point to as to how he's going to reduce the deficit. Deficits are a big issue in this campaign, I think you would agree with me."

But Big Bird wasn't the only topic Cutter wanted to play defense on. She also tackled the topic of the much maligned phrase "binders full of women" that the Obama campaign has been frantically trying to spin into political gold.

"Now Mitt Romney could only point to binders for an accomplishment towards women," she said. "He had a binder full of women. Now that's important because it's really symbolic of the governor's policies. You know, he wouldn't say whether or not he believes in equal pay for women, the Lilly Ledbetter Act. He wasn't honest about contraception. He supports the Rubio bill which puts bosses in charge of whether women have access to contraception on their employer plan."

And not to let her collegiate English major style of analysis go unimpeded, Cutter finished off with the equally mocked line from the president about "Romnesia."

"Now Romnesia is a playful term to describe what Mitt Romney is actually doing in the closing days of this race," Cutter said. "Mitt Romney has run as the ideal Tea Party candidate, severely conservative for the last six years running for president and in the last two weeks of this campaign, he's suddenly moving to the middle. What about all those policies that he declared? He's going to repeal Roe v. Wade, sign that into law. The tax cut for those at the top that he's no pretending doesn't exist, that's going to either increase our deficit or increase taxes on increase taxes on the -- on the middle class."

Watch Cutter's statements below: