Dogs: Who’s crueler, Obama or Romney?

last updated 8 January 2015

In the presidential race, it’s “the issue that won’t die,” said Alexandra Jaffe in NationalJournal.com. Throughout this year’s campaign, Mitt Romney’s opponents—including the Obama White House—have had great fun mocking his 1983 decision to lock his Irish setter, Seamus, in a crate and strap it to the roof of the station wagon for a 12-hour drive to Canada. Just last week, a defensive Ann Romney felt obliged to tell a TV interviewer that “the dog loved it.” But suddenly, “the shoe may be on the other paw.” A columnist for the conservative website The Daily Caller dug up a passage from Obama’s memoir in which the future president confesses to actually eating dog, as a child in Indonesia, and finding the meat “tough.” Obama now has no choice “but to call off the dogs” on the Seamus story, said The Washington Times in an editorial. Strapping a dog to the roof of one’s car may be cruel or eccentric in the eyes of some voters, “but at least Mr. Romney never ate one.”

The tone deafness of conservatives never fails to amaze, said Robert Elisberg in HuffingtonPost.com. They honestly seem to think they’ve check-mated Obama with this “Great Find” in his autobiography, and that Romney’s cruel treatment of poor Seamus is now a dead issue. What they don’t appreciate—although voters surely will—is that Obama was only 9 years old when his stepfather fed him dog, whereas Romney was a mature, 36-year-old husband and father at the time of “Crategate.” The story of Obama’s childhood dog experience reveals precisely nothing about his character and decision-making, other than that he was once a “poor hungry child” in a foreign culture. Romney’s dog story, by contrast, tells us quite a bit about how a “rich, entitled” corporate raider treats the powerless when they become inconvenient.

If this debate is a “measure of our national sanity,” said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post, then “things are not looking good, my friends.” Wouldn’t we be better off discussing our “melting planet, massive unemployment, or dysfunctional government”? Maybe so, but what’s bigger news than “man bites dog”? said James Taranto in The Wall Street Journal. This presidential race could use some laughs. Did you hear, for example, what happened when Obama went to an Indian restaurant and ordered a lassi? “Was he ever disappointed when the waiter brought him a yogurt drink!”