The Big Bird offensive would have been more effective in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Obama came of political age. Lots of people then saw public broadcasting as a needed alternative to commercial television…

In his closing statement Biden identified Romney’s “47 percent of the people who won’t take responsibility” with “my mother and father. He’s talking about the places I grew up in, my neighbors in Scranton, [Pa.], and Claymont, [Del.]”

Those people, born around 1920, would rally to candidates who promised to maintain Social Security and Medicare when Biden first ran for the Senate in 1972. They would understand his reference to Republican opposition to these programs when they were enacted in 1935 and 1965. But that’s 77 and 47 years ago now.

But the Obama campaign wrote off the white working class last spring. Biden was making an appeal that worked in his political youth but not so much these days.