Mitt Romney’s dog-on-the-car-roof story still proves to be his critics’ best friend – The Washington Post
Mitt Romney’s dog-on-the-car-roof story still proves to be his critics’ best friend
The inwards track on Washington politics.
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Members of the media gather around an English bull terrier named Petey during a puny protest by a group called Dogs Against Romney outside of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Display on Feb. Fourteen in Fresh York. (Spencer Platt/GETTY Photos)
It happened more than a quarter century ago, at the embark of a Romney family summer vacation. But the tale of Seamus, the Irish setter who got sick while railing twelve hours on the roof of Mitt Romney’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon, is ballooning into a narrative of epic proportions.
It has come to characterize the candidate — and not in the favorable way Tagg Romney hoped for when he very first talked in two thousand seven about his family’s annual road trips.
Late-night host David Letterman has been providing the dog near-nightly shout-outs. There are parody Web movies, “Dogs Aren’t Luggage” T-shirts and Facebook groups. (“Dogs Against Romney,” which protested outside last month’s Westminster dog display, has more than 38,000 Facebook fans.) The Fresh Yorker featured a cartoon, with Rick Santorum railing in Romney’s rooftop dog carrier, on its cover last week. In the five years since the story was exposed, Fresh York Times columnist Gail Collins has mentioned Seamus in at least fifty columns.
On Wednesday, the top campaign adviser to Santorum injected the dog into the already bitter Republican presidential race.
In response to a question on CNN about Romney’s criticism of an ad being aired by a super PAC supporting Santorum, John Brabender said, “Quite frankly, I’m not sure I’m going to listen to the value judgment of a fellow who strapped his dog to the top of the roof of his car and went hurling down the highway.”
Romney did not simply strap Seamus to the roof. He fastened a dog carrier to the roof rack of the family’s Chevrolet station wagon — the “white whale,” as his boys called it — and assembled a shield to protect Seamus from the highway winds.
The Seamus story very first surfaced in the Boston Globe in a chapter of a biographical series the newspaper published in 2007, when Romney very first ran for president.
One summer day in 1983, as the Globe reported, the overpacked Romney wagon — suitcases, supplies and five sons, ages thirteen and under — set off from Boston for the 12-hour trek to his parents’ cottage in Ontario on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney, then a 36-year-old management consultant, had planned a single stop to refill the tank, get food and go to the bathroom.
Until the evidence of Seamus’s sickness began cascading down the back window.
“Dad!” Tagg, the eldest son, yelled from the back of the wagon. “Gross!”
Romney pulled off the highway, washed down Seamus and the car at a service station, then got back on the highway.
To some animal paramours, the story is an example of cruelty.
“It truly says this man is not like us and is mean,” said Scott Crider, an Alabama marketing guru who founded Dogs Against Romney.
Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Romney supporter, said he did not know the story about Seamus but did not see any harm in an open-air rail.
“We carry our dogs around in the back of our pickup all the time,” Otter said. “I’ve got two dogs, and I just say, ‘Get in,’ and they leap in the back.”
Romney’s political opponents sense an chance. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich raised the incident a few months ago with a campaign movie attacking Romney.
President Obama’s reelection campaign has signaled it would use the story against Romney as well. In January, Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted a picture of Obama holding his dog, Bo, in the presidential limousine and wrote, “How loving owners transport their dogs.”
Political strategists in both parties say this is the uncommon anecdote that could break through the political chatter and permeate the popular culture.
“It’s a signifier,” Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said. “There are certain events that happen over the course of someone’s life that play into a larger story line and feed into a caricature. Seamus the dog story just plays into a negative story line about a dude who you may not totally trust.”
Douglas Gross, who chaired Romney’s two thousand eight Iowa campaign and has become a sometimes-critic of the former Massachusetts governor, said that when the story surfaced in the summer of 2007, “people scrunched their noses and said, ‘What?’ ”
“It’s like the height of the Michigan trees,” Gross said, referring to Romney’s latest comments about the trees there being the “right height.” “It’s another one of those things about Mitt that seems otherworldly. It seems abnormal and raises questions about who he is and whether he’s one of us.”
Romney’s aides are sensitive to the Seamus story. Inwards campaign headquarters in Boston, a reporter was tauntingly admonished recently for broaching the subject, and a campaign spokeswoman did not react Wednesday to questions about the dog.
The candidate has said little about it. When the Wall Street Journal asked him about his dog in December, Romney was at a loss for words: “Uh . . . Love my dog.”
In 2007, Chris Wallace asked Romney, “What were you thinking?” He told the Fox News anchor: “This is a totally airtight kennel, mounted on the top of our car. He climbed in there regularly, loved himself.”
One Romney adviser said that the Seamus anecdote is “a unspoiled negative” but that the campaign does not see it as overly bruising in a contest they believe is being shaped overwhelmingly by the economy.
“For blubbering out noisy, with 8.Trio percent unemployment, if the dog defeats you, you deserve to be defeated,” said the adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Come on. You’ve got to run a good campaign to overcome that. President Obama overcame Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.”
Some Romney supporters played down talk of Seamus.
“Mitt Romney doesn’t have many skeletons, so the fact that the media’s got to go to a dog story bodes well for my candidate,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said.
Others voiced disgust that it had become an issue at all.
“To concentrate on Governor Romney’s dog, Seamus, is shameful,” said Jeb Bradley, a former GOP congressman from Fresh Hampshire. Bradley recalled talking about dogs with Romney as they drove inbetween town hall meetings this past summer. “He was telling me about helping another dog he had supply puppies. . . . I walked away from it knowing that Governor Romney is a dog paramour.”
A few weeks after the story very first came out, Romney’s sister Jane told the Globe that Seamus often left the family’s home to visit his “dog friends” in the neighborhood. “He kept ending up at the pound,” she said.
So in the mid-1980s, Romney sent Seamus to live with Jane in California, where he had more space to wander loosely. If Seamus did not like railing in the rooftop carrier, she said, he would have found a way out of the space.
“He was a Houdini,” she said.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Mitt Romney’s dog-on-the-car-roof story still proves to be his critics’ best friend – The Washington Post
Mitt Romney’s dog-on-the-car-roof story still proves to be his critics’ best friend
The inwards track on Washington politics.
*Invalid email address
Members of the media gather around an English bull terrier named Petey during a puny protest by a group called Dogs Against Romney outside of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Display on Feb. Fourteen in Fresh York. (Spencer Platt/GETTY Photos)
It happened more than a quarter century ago, at the begin of a Romney family summer vacation. But the tale of Seamus, the Irish setter who got sick while railing twelve hours on the roof of Mitt Romney’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon, is ballooning into a narrative of epic proportions.
It has come to characterize the candidate — and not in the favorable way Tagg Romney hoped for when he very first talked in two thousand seven about his family’s annual road trips.
Late-night host David Letterman has been providing the dog near-nightly shout-outs. There are parody Web movies, “Dogs Aren’t Luggage” T-shirts and Facebook groups. (“Dogs Against Romney,” which protested outside last month’s Westminster dog showcase, has more than 38,000 Facebook fans.) The Fresh Yorker featured a cartoon, with Rick Santorum railing in Romney’s rooftop dog carrier, on its cover last week. In the five years since the story was exposed, Fresh York Times columnist Gail Collins has mentioned Seamus in at least fifty columns.
On Wednesday, the top campaign adviser to Santorum injected the dog into the already bitter Republican presidential race.
In response to a question on CNN about Romney’s criticism of an ad being aired by a super PAC supporting Santorum, John Brabender said, “Quite frankly, I’m not sure I’m going to listen to the value judgment of a dude who strapped his dog to the top of the roof of his car and went hurling down the highway.”
Romney did not simply strap Seamus to the roof. He affixed a dog carrier to the roof rack of the family’s Chevrolet station wagon — the “white whale,” as his boys called it — and assembled a shield to protect Seamus from the highway winds.
The Seamus story very first surfaced in the Boston Globe in a chapter of a biographical series the newspaper published in 2007, when Romney very first ran for president.
One summer day in 1983, as the Globe reported, the overpacked Romney wagon — suitcases, supplies and five sons, ages thirteen and under — set off from Boston for the 12-hour trek to his parents’ cottage in Ontario on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. Romney, then a 36-year-old management consultant, had planned a single stop to refill the tank, get food and go to the bathroom.
Until the evidence of Seamus’s sickness commenced dribbling down the back window.
“Dad!” Tagg, the eldest son, yelled from the back of the wagon. “Gross!”
Romney pulled off the highway, washed down Seamus and the car at a service station, then got back on the highway.
To some animal paramours, the story is an example of cruelty.
“It indeed says this boy is not like us and is mean,” said Scott Crider, an Alabama marketing guru who founded Dogs Against Romney.
Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Romney supporter, said he did not know the story about Seamus but did not see any harm in an open-air rail.
“We carry our dogs around in the back of our pickup all the time,” Otter said. “I’ve got two dogs, and I just say, ‘Get in,’ and they hop in the back.”
Romney’s political opponents sense an chance. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich raised the incident a few months ago with a campaign movie attacking Romney.
President Obama’s reelection campaign has signaled it would use the story against Romney as well. In January, Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted a picture of Obama holding his dog, Bo, in the presidential limousine and wrote, “How loving owners transport their dogs.”
Political strategists in both parties say this is the uncommon anecdote that could break through the political chatter and permeate the popular culture.
“It’s a signifier,” Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said. “There are certain events that happen over the course of someone’s life that play into a larger story line and feed into a caricature. Seamus the dog story just plays into a negative story line about a stud who you may not fully trust.”
Douglas Gross, who chaired Romney’s two thousand eight Iowa campaign and has become a sometimes-critic of the former Massachusetts governor, said that when the story surfaced in the summer of 2007, “people scrunched their noses and said, ‘What?’ ”
“It’s like the height of the Michigan trees,” Gross said, referring to Romney’s latest comments about the trees there being the “right height.” “It’s another one of those things about Mitt that seems otherworldly. It seems abnormal and raises questions about who he is and whether he’s one of us.”
Romney’s aides are sensitive to the Seamus story. Inwards campaign headquarters in Boston, a reporter was tauntingly admonished recently for broaching the subject, and a campaign spokeswoman did not react Wednesday to questions about the dog.
The candidate has said little about it. When the Wall Street Journal asked him about his dog in December, Romney was at a loss for words: “Uh . . . Love my dog.”
In 2007, Chris Wallace asked Romney, “What were you thinking?” He told the Fox News anchor: “This is a fully airtight kennel, mounted on the top of our car. He climbed in there regularly, loved himself.”
One Romney adviser said that the Seamus anecdote is “a unspoiled negative” but that the campaign does not see it as overly hurting in a contest they believe is being shaped overwhelmingly by the economy.
“For weeping out noisy, with 8.Trio percent unemployment, if the dog defeats you, you deserve to be defeated,” said the adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Come on. You’ve got to run a good campaign to overcome that. President Obama overcame Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers.”
Some Romney supporters played down talk of Seamus.
“Mitt Romney doesn’t have many skeletons, so the fact that the media’s got to go to a dog story bodes well for my candidate,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said.
Others voiced disgust that it had become an issue at all.
“To concentrate on Governor Romney’s dog, Seamus, is shameful,” said Jeb Bradley, a former GOP congressman from Fresh Hampshire. Bradley recalled talking about dogs with Romney as they drove inbetween town hall meetings this past summer. “He was telling me about helping another dog he had supply puppies. . . . I walked away from it knowing that Governor Romney is a dog paramour.”
A few weeks after the story very first came out, Romney’s sister Jane told the Globe that Seamus often left the family’s home to visit his “dog friends” in the neighborhood. “He kept ending up at the pound,” she said.
So in the mid-1980s, Romney sent Seamus to live with Jane in California, where he had more space to wander loosely. If Seamus did not like railing in the rooftop carrier, she said, he would have found a way out of the space.
“He was a Houdini,” she said.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.