The First Puppy: A nation holds its breath

last updated 8 January 2015

Like most campaign promises, this one was easier made than fulfilled, said Lini Kadaba in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Throughout his grueling, two-year run for president, Barack Obama shored up support among daughters Sasha and Malia by promising them a new puppy when the campaign was over, a pledge he repeated on election night with the world as his witness. Now that it’s time to deliver, however, the president-elect is finding that the devil’s in the details. As Obama explained in his first press conference, the family’s preference would be to adopt a shelter dog, thus sparing it from extermination. But because eldest daughter Malia has allergies, they would also prefer a “hypoallergenic” purebred—and as Obama put it, “A lot of shelter dogs are mutts, like me.”

It’s too soon to talk about impeachment, said Helen Popkin in MSNBC.com, but that could change if Obama angers animal lovers by rejecting all those wonderful dogs in shelters. If he would just check any one of dozens of dog-related websites, he’d quickly discover that shelters have hundreds of hypoallergenic, mixed-breed pooches such as goldendoodles and cockapoos. By rescuing one of these poor creatures and installing it in the White House, Obama would be setting a compassionate example for the nation. Nothing else but a mixed-breed dog from a shelter will do! said Sandy Britt in the Nashville Tennessean. Most other presidents have succumbed to “purebred elitism.” But America is a melting-pot nation in which peoples of all ethnicities and races can pursue happiness, and “no dog more embodies the American spirit” than a mutt.

I beg to differ, said Caroline Baum in Bloomberg.com. What message would it send to the bin Ladens and Ahmadinejads of this world for Obama to start palling around with some prissy thing called a “goldendoodle”? “A man is judged by the company he keeps,” and what Obama needs is a tough working dog, one that could intimidate the leaders of rogue states and, here at home, “demonstrate a work ethic for teen slackers.” I vote for two dogs, said Meghan Daum in the Los Angeles Times. One for his daughters and one for Obama himself. The fact is the president-elect “will never be loved quite the way folks are loving him right now.” In the post-euphoric years ahead, he may well find the need for one of those loyal, devoted companions in whose eyes one’s “favorability ratings tend to be consistently positive.”