The following story about Political Kitchen was syndicated nationally by Gannett.

Food for political thought - straight from kitchen
July 18, 2006
By JENNA JOHNSON
DES MOINES REGISTER STAFF WRITER
Twice a month, Bob Singer cakes on some makeup - MAC brand - and replaces his glasses with contact lenses to take off a few years.

Then he mops the kitchen floor. When his buddy arrives with a video camera, it’s time to try to make politics entertaining for a teenage audience - youth around the age of his 19-year-old son.

It worked for Jon Stewart, the Comedy Central “newscaster” whose “Daily Show” scores a reported 1.5 million viewers per night.

“He’s my age, you know,” said the 48-year-old Singer, who launched a political satire Web site, politicalkitchen.com, featuring skit, sin April.

But unlike Stewart, Singer’s stage is his well-equipped Windsor Heights kitchen. There are no production meetings, no fancy equipment, no producers or editors or sound guys - just two microphones hanging from the ceiling along with a rack of shiny pots. And Stewart, presumably, does not have to mop.

“Who wants to see another talking head behind a desk?” said Singer, who by day works as the director of federal grants and contracts at Des Moines Area Community College.

He uses cuisine and culinary tools - whether it be brownies topped with onions, wine with a snarky new label or a talking tea kettle - to explain what he thinks is going politically wrong in America.

A key component of his sketches is also explaining why viewers should care.

Maybe if they care, Singer said, they’ll vote in the next election.

So far, his audience is only through the Web, although he dreams of one day being picked up by a TV or cable network. Political Kitchen has had more than 270,000 hits from 53 countries since Singer started the site three months ago.

“I had hits from the Cocos Islands,” he said, referring to the Australian-governed islands southwest of Indonesia. “I had to look that one up. I don’t know where that is. I’m from Jersey. I didn’t even know where Iowa was until I moved here.”

The idea is fresh, and it could become another Web-based grass-roots phenomenon, said Mike Sims, one of two volunteer cameramen and a KCCI-TV photographer.

“We met for lunch, and he told me about this idea,” Sims said. “And I thought, ‘That’s really cutting-edge.’ ”

While Singer’s target audience is anyone 18 to 54 - the same group he catered to as a political reporter at WHO-TV in the early 1980s - Singer wants to entertain and intellectually challenge a generation that grew up with MTV.

And not just his three kids, who snicker as they see their dad jumping around the kitchen, ranting about whistle-blower rights, last-minute bill amendments, the war on terror, off-shore oil drilling, how only the wealthy benefit from tax cuts, and how the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop is on Iowa’s Homeland Security “critical assets” list.

His inspiration is the daily news - the New York Times headlines, nightly national news, popular blogs and those little articles that seem to get buried under “bigger stories.”

From there he writes scripts - on napkins while dining out, on the computer before taking his 7-year-old daughter to school, and in his head while driving to work.

Then comes taping: That’s the key to hooking younger viewers, he said.

There’s no tripod. Kids these days want fast cuts, tilted shots, moving cameras - anything but monotony, Singer said.

“It’s an MTV thing - I like a lot of camera movement,” he said during Wednesday night’s taping of “Intelligence on Ice,” which uses frozen dinners to explore the letter that the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee wrote to the president asking why the committee has been “kept on ice” about security secrets.

Shoots can last for hours. And they can involve the pain of a steam burn, the misery of a 110-degree kitchen, a fridge of spoiled food, and brownie batter splattered all over the ceiling.

And once the taping is done, there are still hours upon hours of editing and posting.

So far there are at least eight clips online, and people around the world are apparently watching.

Even Singer’s 19-year-old son, who lives in Iowa City, and all of his friends are watching - they’re even laughing, Singer said.

“I don’t want to appear as an old man,” said Singer. “But there’s no reason a 40-something guy can’t produce something that’s creative and draws an audience.”

Bob Singer, a former political reporter for WHO-TV, tapes about two skits a month for his Web site. His target audience is anyone 18 to 54, but he tries to make it interesting for teenagers.and has gotten more than 300,000 hits from 53 countries. These pictures are from the filming of the “Intelligence on Ice” piece, the videographer is Mike Sims. Quiet on the set, Singer studies his lines in the kitchen/studio of his home.

Shoots for the political skits Bob Singer puts on his Web site can last for hours. Once the taping is finished, more time is spent editing the video and posting it online. He writes the skits on things ranging from a computer to a napkin.