Obama’s Cheesecake Factory jab spurs a midterm spat
A cheesecake reference is now a campaign issue. That's the kind of moment that makes you roll your eyes, but it also tells you something about how thin the margins are this cycle when both parties are grasping for anything that moves the economic argument their way. Obama's remark gave Republicans an opening to paint Democrats as out of touch, while Democrats treated the pushback as proof the GOP is desperate.
I'd want to know exactly what Obama said, because context matters in these moments. A joke about prices at a chain restaurant lands very differently than a dig at the people who eat there, and the coverage of the spat may have already blurred that line. Either way, it's a distraction from the substantive questions voters actually face, and that's the real cost of a news cycle like this.
The midterms are days away, and a conversation about a restaurant chain is getting more oxygen than a lot of actual policy differences. That says more about where our political attention goes than about the issues themselves.