Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton contested the scope of the federal government. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas clashed over slavery. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon competed to establish a vision for Cold War America. However, these debates are but paltry preludes to the dogfight between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney regarding Seamus, Romney’s Irish Setter. Lately, the media has been buzzing with the story about how back in 1983, the buttoned-down Mitt Romney buttoned up his dog, Seamus, in a crate on the roof of his station wagon for a 12-hour family road trip from Boston to Ontario. Seamus couldn’t walk in this confined crate. But in a Massachusetts variation of Montezuma’s Revenge, he did get the runs. And when he did, Governor Romney dutifully stopped his car to wash both his windshield and Seamus. To embarrass Romney, President Obama’s campaign quickly called attention to the canine controversy, which dates nearly 30 years back. David Axelrod, President Obama’s chief strategist and resident dog psychiatrist, tweeted a picture of President Obama and his dog, Bo, riding comfortably in the spacious backseat of a presidential limousine. Axelrod captioned his tweet, “How Loving Owners Transport their Dogs.” Romney’s campaign staff quickly retaliated. They discovered a passage from President Obama’s autobiography “Dreams of My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance” that recounts how President Obama “learned … to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice) and away from the dinner table was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy),” when he was a child growing up in Indonesia. Eric Fehrnstrom, the Romney adviser best known for comparing his boss’ campaign to an Etch-a-Sketch, redeemed himself in the eyes of the Republican coalition when he retweeted Axelrod’s picture of Bo and President Obama with the caption “In hindsight, a chilling photo.” Jim Treacher of “The Daily Caller” quipped, “Say what you want about Romney, but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth.” Not to be outdone, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer doggedly asked about Seamus during a televised interview with Mitt and Ann Romney. And a Democratic fat-cat was so shocked by Romney’s treatment of Seamus that he donated $1 million to a new political action committee called “Animal Lovers against Romney. According to CNN commentator David Frum in his April 29, 2012 article titled “Why Obama vs. Romney is becoming a dogfight,” this canine controversy is likely to continue because it reinforces negative stereotypes about Romney and Obama. Hence, “the dog-on-the-roof story” portrays Romney as “a heartless technocrat, ready to conduct brutal experiments on unsuspecting people or beasts”, writes Frum. Likewise, “the Obama-eats-dog story” fits the narrative that “Obama is an alien, raised in alienation from basic American values and protected by a complicit news media that refuses to report embarrassing facts about him such as dog-eating.” President Obama’s best explanation for why he has escalated these dog wars is that he understands that “it’s a boy eat dog world out there,” as he said at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The Obama campaign has deployed the presidential dog, Bo, in a web ad encouraging voters to “Join Pet Lovers for Obama.” The White House has created a website selling dog sweaters that “keep your furry friend feeling cozy.” And “Bark for Barack” will go down in history alongside the famous campaign slogans of the past, such as “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Naturally, this debate ended up as the subject of a comedy routine on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show.” In fact, Stewart satirized this story after trenchantly observing that only 11 percent of network campaign coverage focuses on issues. There’s the rub. America faces staggering problems–record high debt, trillions in unfunded entitlement liabilities, stubbornly high unemployment and a dangerously unsettled world. Yet Obama and Romney’s presidential campaigns resemble a “The Daily Show” satire more than a Lincoln-Douglas debate. Maybe America really is going to the dogs. Eric Meyers is a new Upper from Miami, FL.
